Conferring the marketability on the ever-underdog category of documentary film is the gleaming icon of the Oscar. But documentaries, in particular, have had a troubled relationship with the statuette. Fasten your seatbelts, viewers...This WILL get ugly.
1930s & 1940s
For the first 14 years of the Academy Awards' existence, no special category for nonfiction film existed, although precedent was set in 1936 when a special Oscar went to the March of Time series "for its significance to motion pictures and for having revolutionized one of the most important branches of the industry—the newsreel."
In 1941, as the United States entered WWII, the Motion Picture Academy permanently ensconced a nonfiction film category, encouraging and recognizing documentaries in a time of global crisis.
The first documentary to get the Oscar in the new category was the Canadian production Churchill's Island. Perhaps it was making up for lost time, or maybe it was good wartime diplomacy when, in 1942, John Ford's The Battle of Midway shared the documentary Oscar with three other battleground accounts from a field of 25 (!) international nominees.
1960s
While it went unnoticed by the home-viewers, an Oscar milestone happened courtesy of a documentary in 1969. It was learned that the winning nonfiction feature, The Young Americans, the travels of the positive-attitude musical troupe, had actually made its theatrical debut in 1967; the film was therefore disqualified to compete in the class of '68.
The Motion Picture Academy withdrew the Oscar and later awarded it in a private ceremony to the runner-up, Journey Into Self, the only time an Academy Award was subject to a recall.
In 1968 there was a telling moment when, moments after presenter Martha Raye read a letter from General William Westmoreland thanking Hollywood for continuing to support US troops in Vietnam, the Oscar went to The Anderson Platoon, a French documentary with a mixed POV of the war.
1970s
Six years later, when the American-made anti-Vietnam documentary Hearts and Minds was handed the gold, producer Bert Schneider (who said Hearts and Minds should have competed as Best Picture, since it was, by any standards, a disaster movie) read a telegram of congrats from the Viet Cong delegation at the Paris peace talks. Bob Hope and John Wayne protested backstage.
Appointing himself Academy spokesman, Frank Sinatra read a hastily-written disclaimer/apology at the end of the show. The broadcast's producer Howard Koch complained "I never heard such controversy in my life! The phones won't stop!" (This from the fellow who had produced the Orson Welles War of the Worlds panic broadcast in 1938.) One reporter noted that not even Jane Fonda had used the sacrosanct Oscar acceptance speech as an antiwar soapbox when she won Best Actress for Klute in 1971.
The politicization of the Oscars became standard from the 1970s onwards. Documentaries would bring fodder for controversy, although one in 1977 which brought much attention down on the ceremonies...wasn't even nominated.
The Vanessa Redgrave-produced The Palestinians, sympathetic to Yassir Arafat and the PLO, drew protesters and threats from the Jewish Defense League. Few theaters were showing The Palestinians, but Redgrave was up for Best Supporting Actress in the widely-circulating drama Julia, and the outspoken thespian lashed out at the "Zionist hoodlums" from the podium.
1990s & 2000s
The Motion Picture Academy's voting committee for documentaries lost what goodwill they had gained with homosexual activists by ignoring Paris is Burning, one of the most critically-hailed documentaries of 1990. In a published interview, feature-documentary committee chair Sy Gomberg downplayed the drag-queen spectacle as unimportant and frivolous, adding fuel to the flame of a gay picket line outside the ceremonies (militant homosexuals were already set off by the Oscar nominations of Silence of the Lambs and Basic Instinct).
That night, when Debra Chasnoff won an Oscar for the documentary short subject Deadly Deception: General Electric, Nuclear Weapons, and Our Environment, she thanked her lesbian "life partner" and shouted "Boycott GE!" Thus scoring a double-bronze in the protest Olympics, though her achievement has been largely forgotten since Michael Moore's "Shame on you, George Bush!" tirade in 2003 when he won the gold for Bowling for Columbine, which he excoriated both the 2000 elections and the subsequent US invasion of Iraq.
The Paris is Burning rejection was only one episode in a long-running Oscar soap opera, the apparently willful snubbing of notable and popular documentaries throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Critics Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel in their widely-watched TV forums lambasted the Academy for ignoring The Thin Blue Line, A Brief History of Time, Hoop Dreams, and other nonfiction cinema that had become genuine audience draws.
Instead, the shadowy nominating membership bestowed Oscars often on obscurities that only played one or two auditoriums in NY or LA. The documentary committee was accused of being a bunch of old geezers out of step with modern tastes, tainted by cronyism and coziness with specialty-documentary distributors.
Complaints of too many Davids and not enough Goliaths in the documentary class took on uglier shades when some filmmakers—Spike Lee most notoriously—chafed at the high quotient of Holocaust/Jewish-interest material. Nonetheless, continuous bad publicity impelled reforms in the Oscar pre-screening and balloting process.
Very possibly nobody will ever be satisfied with the documentary Oscars. Best-case scenario: the disillusionment will make the mass-audience look more towards alternatives, such as the Independent Spirit Awards or Sundance as indicators of documentary excellence.