When was the last time a film won the Nobel Prize? More plausible, when was the last time a film led to someone's nomination for the Nobel Prize? The answer to the second question is ... today. Thanks to the documentary An Inconvenient Truth (and all his work to raise awareness of global warming), Al Gore is a contender for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, the winner of which is announced in October. Sure, he probably could have been nominated without the film, but it is obvious that the film did help. In fact, Boerge Brende, one of the two Norwegian Parliament members who nominated Gore, mentioned the movie in his statement to Reuters.

This is great news for Gore, who has just increased his post-Presidential-loss status another huge notch. It was good enough that An Inconvenient Truth did so well in theaters and then was nominated for an Academy Award. But who cares about winning an Oscar when there's a chance to get a million bucks and the prestige of being a Nobel Laureate? Well, Davis Guggenheim probably cares, as he is the one who directed the film, despite so many people referring to it as Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth. Guggenheim isn't nominated for the Nobel Prize, only the Oscar, and worst case scenario is that because of the film's elevated acclaim in its association with the Nobel nomination, Academy voters will see no need to give the doc award to Truth.

The documentary Nobelity is a "what can we do to help?" movie, and as such, has an unusual distribution plan. The film's opening weekend is meant to coincide with Earth Day, April 22. The distributors have coordinated screenings with local and national non-profit groups at churches, community centers and independently owned movie theaters. In Austin, the movie will screen this weekend at a church and a wilderness preserve, and will play at Alamo Drafthouse Lake Creek in May; check out the variety in the list of screening locations across the country.

Nobelity combines several styles of documentary: the old-school documentary talking-heads style seen mostly on TV these days, the personal documentary popularized by Michael Moore (although Ross McElwee does it better), and a sweeping panoramic visual style, like the film Baraka. The movie succeeds best at the panoramic visual style, and least when the talking heads go on for too long.

Director Turk Pipkin structured the movie's story around his quest to learn more about the world's problems and the ways he might help. He turns to Nobel Prize winners for information and advice, and travels around the world to chat with a number of Nobel Laureates. The movie alternates between interviews and outdoor montage sequences set in the regions where the Laureates were interviewed, to give us an idea of the personality of those regions.