Fueled by box-office success and critical raves, A24’s You Can See Everything may be well on the road to a milestone Best Picture Oscar nomination — but its prospects in the Best Documentary Feature race are far less certain.
Gold Derby spoke to several members of the Academy’s documentary branch — two directors and seven producers — about their thoughts on the hit doc, and their opinions ranged from raves (“I was totally engaged”) to outright dismissal (“a spectacle dressed up as artistic intellect”).
Directed by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim, the film follows disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes and her romantic partner, Billy Evans, before she begins an 11-year prison sentence for defrauding investors. The nearly three-hour documentary wasn’t on anyone’s radar until two months ago, when it made its surprise debut at Telluride. But since then, it has generated considerable discussion among Oscar pundits, who have cast the film as a front-runner in several races, including Best Picture, director and supporting actress. But whether You Can See Everything will make the Best Documentary Feature shortlist — and then the final five nominees — remains up to the very particular 770 members of the documentary branch. Because they select what the full Academy then votes for in the final round, their tastes have leaned away from commercially successful, populist fare.
The Academy’s documentary category has long been among its most contentious, partly because of a complicated and frequently revised system of eligibility and voting rules. The Academy began recognizing documentaries in 1941, but didn’t establish a dedicated documentary branch until 2001. Before then, an unspecified number of Academy members could screen eligible films and select finalists, a process that drew years of criticism over both the films nominated and those overlooked. Among the most conspicuous omissions were Steve James’s Hoop Dreams, Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb, Michael Moore’s Roger & Me, Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, and Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Brother’s Keeper.
The selection process has since undergone several revisions. Until 2011, small volunteer committees within the documentary branch watched every eligible film in its entirety and assembled a shortlist. Beginning in 2012, all branch members could participate in selecting the shortlist.
But widespread participation hasn’t necessarily translated into greater recognition for popular docs. Case in point: Recent snubs include Morgan Neville’s Won’t You Be My Neighbor?, Steve James’s Life Itself, Matthew Heineman’s American Symphony, Davis Guggenheim’s Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie, and Brett Morgen’s Jane. More recently, Will & Harper made the documentary shortlist, while two widely praised, audience-friendly films from 2024 — Luther: Never Too Much, about the singer Luther Vandross, and Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story — did not. Will & Harper ultimately was not nominated.
So what does this mean for You Can See Everything? Based on the voters Gold Derby talked to, the branch is very much split.
“Elizabeth Holmes is a fascinating person,” said Voter 1. “The film gets you to look at her in this very interesting way. I was totally engaged.”
Another member liked the doc because it “felt like a genuine attempt at the truth.” “The foregrounding of the fact that we pay our subjects or that we have these negotiations about how much to pay people felt more authentic than a lot of the docs,” said Voter 2. “More authentic even than ones like All My Sisters, about young Iranian girls who are being filmed for 18 years.”
“I love the fact everyone’s talking about it — a documentary,” said Voter 3. “I love all the marketing. It’s ridiculous and so over the top, but I’m kind of into it.”
You Can See Everything has grossed an unprecedented $63.9 million since its release on Oct. 16. It’s a much needed fiscal and critical success for a genre that has struggled in recent years.
But according to another branch member, the film’s box office success isn’t necessarily a good thing.
“The movie is like Tiger King,” Voter 4 said. “It can never be replicated. It’s an outlier and it’s a real problem because we have this false economy that happens with documentaries all of the time.”
Several branch members felt the film was less about Elizabeth Holmes than about Nathan Fielder’s reaction to Holmes and Evans.
“This is not a typical documentary that is out to uncover the truth,” Voter 5 said. “It’s so much more than that. It’s about how we perceive truth.”
But naysayers called the doc “a spectacle dressed up as artistic intellect.”
“It has the sheen of very high-end,” said Voter 6. “All of those close-ups just got so annoying,” added Voter 7.
A fellow unimpressed branch member likened You Can See Everything to a reality show. “I can’t believe we are giving Elizabeth Holmes more oxygen,” said Voter 8. “She is a sociopath. She had these children to get sympathy and now people are giving that to her.”
What doc branch members on both sides of the aisle did agree on is that You Can See Everything is not genre-bending as some have asserted. “It’s not like it’s the first time we have seen re-creation or characters reading scripts that were written from somebody’s memory of what was said,” Voter 9 said. “Everybody in the doc branch has seen all of the devices used in the doc in other docs before.”
Directors including Robert Greene (Actress), Sarah Polley (Stories We Tell) and Joshua Oppenheimer (The Act of Killing) have used traditional narrative filmmaking devices to explore the thin line between fiction and reality.
As Voter 6 put it, You Can See Everything may be an amazing psychological character study, but “it will be really annoying if they present it as this documentary that is the first to question its own form.”
That said, Voter 1 argued that what sets the film apart from other genre-bending docs is that Fielder and Oppenheim “engaged in the deception concurrently to the subjects.”
TIFF’s documentary programmer Thom Powers selected You Can See Everything for DOC NYC’s feature shortlist, which has long been a predictor of Oscar nominees. But Powers wonders if the film’s unprecedented success will hurt its doc Oscar prospects. “The branch has kind of deliberately, when it comes time for nominations, moved in other directions than highly popular films,” he said.
But Voter 8 said the film’s commercial success has little to do with why it may fall short of an Oscar nomination. The issue is that the film simply hasn’t won over some voters.
“It just didn’t resonate with some of us,” said Voter 8. “If it doesn’t get nominated, we are going to get such backlash, which will be worse than if it just gets nominated and wins. I just think it’s such an ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ situation.”
