Mariska Hargitay took home two Emmys on Saturday for My Mom Jayne, the documentary she directed about her late mother, Jayne Mansfield. Back in December, the Academy’s documentary branch left that same film off its 15-title shortlist for the Oscars — after My Mom Jayne premiered at Cannes, drew rave reviews, and won the Producers Guild Award over Mr. Nobody Against Putin, which went on to win the Academy Award.
During the same long weekend Hargitay was collecting her Emmys, three documentaries about high-profile subjects were premiering at Venice and Telluride: the Oasis reunion film Don’t Look Back in Anger, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything, and Alex Gibney’s Musk. All three drew big receptions and immediate Oscar buzz — the same spot My Mom Jayne was in a year ago.
Hargitay’s film was one of nine celebrity-focused documentaries the branch passed over last December. The others were Becoming Led Zeppelin, Being Eddie, Diane Warren: Relentless, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, Marlee Matlin: Not Alone Anymore, Selena y Los Dinos, Stans, and Stiller & Meara: Nothing Is Lost. A year earlier the branch did the same thing to Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story, which won both the BAFTA and PGA Award for Best Documentary.
Snubbing docs about entertainers or high-profile (sometimes infamous) celebrities wasn’t always a trend. Searching for Sugar Man, about the hunt for a forgotten Detroit folk singer who turned out to be a superstar in South Africa, won this category in 2013. 20 Feet From Stardom, a look at the backup singers behind decades of rock and soul records, took it in 2014. And Amy, Asif Kapadia’s portrait of Amy Winehouse built from home video and archival footage, won in 2016 — the same year Liz Garbus’s Nina Simone documentary What Happened, Miss Simone? was also nominated.
In the decade since, the doc branch has nominated 50 films, and only six focused on someone who was already (at least somewhat) famous: RBG, Navalny, Bobi Wine: The People’s President, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, I Am Not Your Negro, and O.J.: Made in America. None of them is a straightforward celebrity profile. Raoul Peck built I Am Not Your Negro from an unfinished James Baldwin manuscript to trace race in America; Laura Poitras used Nan Goldin’s career as a way into the Sacklers and the opioid crisis; and Ezra Edelman spent nearly eight hours on O.J. Simpson to profile race and the justice system. The subject is famous, but the film is about something bigger.
Don’t Look Back in Anger is the kind of film the branch has been hardest on: an authorized portrait of famous musicians. Becoming Led Zeppelin, It’s Never Over, Jeff Buckley, and Selena y Los Dinos all missed last year’s shortlist. Music itself isn’t the obstacle — Summer of Soul won in 2022 — but that film was about a forgotten festival and what it meant, not a star. Steven Knight wrote Don’t Look Back in Anger, Will Lovelace and Dylan Southern directed, and it follows the Oasis Live ’25 tour with the Gallagher brothers sitting for their first joint interviews in decades. Venice gave it an eight-minute standing ovation, it’s at 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, and it opens in Imax and theaters Sept. 11 before heading to Hulu and Disney+.
Gibney has the pedigree with two previous Oscar nominations and a 2008 win for Taxi to the Dark Side. In Musk, he directs a four-hour interrogation of the world’s richest man which is certainly serious enough for this branch. The catch is that they’ve never nominated anything quite like it. When the doc branch takes on corporate power, it goes through systems or sympathetic protagonists: the doping program in Icarus, the factory floor in American Factory, Nan Goldin against the Sacklers in All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. A film aimed squarely at one living mogul hasn’t made the cut in the past decade. Musk got a five-minute ovation at Venice on Tuesday and runs three hours 45 minutes with an intermission. Bleecker Street opens it Oct. 16, with streaming on HBO Max to follow.
You Can See Everything got the loudest reception of the three. Elizabeth Holmes and her partner, Billy Evans, had been looking for someone to tell their story, and the project landed at A24 with Fielder and Oppenheim, who moved in with the couple in the weeks before Holmes reported to prison in 2023 to serve an 11-year sentence for defrauding investors. The two ended up interacting with Fielder directly, making him a character in the film he was shooting. It played Telluride as an unannounced screening with phones locked away, and A24 is reportedly eyeing a Best Picture push for it, in part because of the hurdles in the documentary branch.
None of that closes off the Emmys. Television Academy rules let a documentary compete there as long as it hasn’t picked up an Oscar nomination in any category before it’s submitted, which is how Super/Man, I Am: Celine Dion, and Will & Harper all landed Emmy nominations last year after the Academy passed on them. The order can run the other way, too, though it usually ends the same: Still: A Michael J. Fox Movie won the Emmy in 2023, campaigned for an Oscar, made the shortlist, and got cut.
That path requires a television home, and all three have one. Don’t Look Back in Anger goes to Hulu and Disney+, and both Musk and You Can See Everything should land on HBO Max. The Academy’s shortlist arrives in December.
