As long as the Academy gives separate screenwriting Oscars for original screenplay and adapted screenplay, they should also consider honoring non-fiction screenplays. Not all documentaries have writers, but many do -- according to the Writers Guild of America the number of docs with writing credit has increased by 50% in recent years. That is why the WGA began awarding non-fiction screenwriters two years ago; Super-Size Me was the first to be honored.

I'm not sure why the WGA announced the doc noms separately from the rest, but in doing so the guild is allowing for the category to be given less attention. Of course, with the news that Borat is nominated for the adaptation prize, everything else about the WGA Awards is being overshadowed (I paid more notice to the Borat news, too). But I think it is important for documentary fans to know that the WGA does honor non-fiction writers. Maybe one day they'll even go and split up the category to distinguish between the original and adapted non-fiction scripts (there may not be enough of the latter, though).

The nominees for the 2007 Documentary Screenplay Award are: Deliver Us From Evil (written by Amy Berg); The Heart of the Game (written by Ward Serrill); Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos (story by John Dower and Mark Monroe; screenplay by Mark Monroe); Who Killed the Electric Car? (written by Chris Paine); Why We Fight (written by Eugene Jarecki).

Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos had its North American premiere at this year's Tribeca Film Festival, and the film's theatrical run begins in New York tomorrow (and will be expanding across the country in the weeks to come). The film is a magnificent, thrilling documentary -- that just happens to be yours truly's favorite film of the year -- about the rise and fall of the New York Cosmos, a professional soccer team that, for a very brief time in the late 1970s, ruled New York City. With a squad that included such international stars as Pele, Giorgio Chinaglia and Franz Beckenbauer, the team sold out Giants stadium -- that's over 70,000 people -- multiple times, and won several NASL titles.

Producer John Battsek and co-director/editor Paul Crowder sat down with Cinematical shortly before their film's premiere at Tribeca to talk about Once in a Lifetime, Chelsea (the football club, not the part of Manhattan) and international soccer; the movie-related bits of that conversation appear below.

Cinematical: How did you guys come upon this story? How did the movie come about?

John Battsek: I'd just come off Live Forever which is a sort of Britpop feature doc, and I was talking to a guy -- a friend of mind in New York -- just thinking about what one might do next, and he mentioned the New York Cosmos. And it's one of those things where -- because I'm a big big football fan, big sports fan, big soccer fan -- it was one of those things that just immediately stuck in my head. I had a sort of vague, subliminal memory of big players being in New York, and I know that the Cosmos as a team were this incredibly well-regarded club, but I didn't really know the story, and that just intrigued me. A story set in New York, at that time, about football ...

And I've always had this thing about football ... I mean, it's slightly mean of me, but I've always thought the joke is on America, you know, because America does for the most part regard itself as the greatest country in the world, and yet this sport -- that is played on every square millimeter of the entire planet by everyone if they've got half a second to play it -- and [American] people are like "Soccer ... it's boring," you know? And so the idea of a story set in America, dealing with this sport that America's never really got its head 'round, I thought sounded like it could be really interesting.

Editor's note: The review was originally published on April 14, shortly before the film's Tribeca screenings.

Hundreds of soccer documentaries have been made, but for Americans who love the sport, they generally lead only to further frustration. The domestic efforts to address the sport we love tend to be either defensive (insisting over and over again that soccer is as worthy of adoration as baseball or football) or academic (trying to reason strangers to the game, hoping that, through education, they will come to understand and appreciate it). The European and Latin ones, though more enjoyable, ultimately serve only to reminds us of what we can never have. For the American soccer fan, then, Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos is like a bolt of lightning on a sunny day: an explosion of sudden, blinding power that comes utterly out of nowhere, so unexpected that it leaves you breathless. It's a wide-eyed, delirious celebration of American soccer, the likes of which we've never seen. And it's indescribably wonderful, the kind of film that brings a smile to your face the moment it begins and doesn't let go. Directors Paul Crowder and John Dower clearly love soccer, and they revel in the insanity that was the New York Cosmos, the team that dominated the North American Soccer League (NASL) during its glory days of the late 1970's. Their passion and energy is in every frame of the film, and in combination with sharp editing (Crowder is an editor by trade), an irresistible soundtrack, and a clever, 70's inspired sensibility that touches everything from the movie's fonts to its music, they serve to make the film and its story irresistible.

When I'm in the mood to get good and depressed, I just take a look at the weekend box office numbers. There are few things more guaranteed to send me into the depths of despair than seeing how many people lined up to see the latest Tyler Perry flick or Adam Sandler comedy (and I use that term very loosely when applied to Sandler, who ranks just marginally below David Spade on my list of people I wish would never, ever make another movie). I swear, every time I see Sandler on the screen, I just want to hurt him -- and I'm a peace-loving, non-violent person under ordinary circumstances. I'm sure he's a perfectly nice person in real life, and he's probably a blast at parties, but I'd rather get my gums scraped without numbing medication than sit through his films. Perplexingly, though, his tend to do okay at the box office, so apparently a lot of people actually like him.

Sandler's latest effort, Click, about a man who buys a remote with the power to affect reality, dominated the top weekend box office slot, with an estimated take of $40 million. The film is going to need some good word-of-mouth to get past its budget of $70 million and into the black, but I expect it will make it over the hump. Jack Black vehicle Nacho Libre, in theaters for 10 days now, has raked in $52.7 million off a relatively small $35 million budget, already putting the flick in the black for Paramount and pretty much guaranteeing we'll be seeing more of Black in the future. For some reason, Black doesn't tend to irritate me nearly so much as Sandler, but neither do I find him particularly appealing. I think what it comes down to for me is that Sandler's roles often have this streak of meanness running through the surface comedy, which I really dislike. Black, on the other hand, tends to have this innocence and naivete about him that's just charming, even when he's running around in tights.

I'm not exactly sure what it is, but there's something special about male bonding. Some of the greatest times of my life have been spent sharing a pitcher of beer with my best buddies, telling stories and poking fun at one another's stupidity. Unlike women, while guys are extremely competitive in nature, they rarely let it get too personal. If a man is upset with another man, they tend to confront one another and lay all the cards out on the table, instead of pretending and whispering behind each others' back. But that's guys. And that's what guys do.

This is not to say that male bonding is better or more fulfilling than female bonding. The two are just different. Probably because men are less emotional than women. They don't need as much. Guys tend to connect through their history together and not over a similar taste in shoes. Heck, I wouldn't even wear shoes if the ground weren't so dirty.

The following films all feature the different ways in which men bond -- whether on the battlefield or the playing field, inside the home or outside at the bar. The characters here are all men being men, sharing their hopes, their dreams and bonding just like one of the guys. Welcome to this week's Trailer Park: 

Hey Karina and Chris--

While I agree with both of you that the desperate desire on the part of Tribeca's organizers to have A Really Big Festival! has resulted in the presence of some truly horrible movies, I have to say that doesn't (at least for me) make the good -- and even great -- films at the festival any less worthwhile. Granted, it's risky as hell to just blindly buy tickets to anything (particularly, as Karina pointed out, to features), but if attendees choose carefully, they can create a pretty strong week of film-going.

Like Karina, I've seen some crap, but have also seen some very good films. Even today, more than a week after I first saw it, I'm still over the moon about Once in a Lifetime, the New York Cosmos documentary that made me so damn happy it might have become one of my favorite films ever, not just of the festival. And, as a Soviet and Russian history nerd, I've really enjoyed Freedom's Fury and Hammer and Tickle, which offer very different looks at the Eastern Bloc. Freedom's Fury is built around the 1956 Olympic semi-final water polo game between Hungary and the USSR, but is most valuable as a lesson on the 1956 Hungarian revolution; Hammer and Tickle, meanwhile, explores the history of dissent under Soviet rule through jokes. The latter is not an entirely successful film but the history is fascinating, if you're into that sort of thing. In addition, 37 Uses for a Dead Sheep, which details the difficult past and present of the Pamir Kirghiz people, is a pretty wonderful film, sure enough of its approach and subject matter to have a charming, gangly confidence that is all too rare in film, documentary or otherwise.

Hundreds of soccer documentaries have been made, but for Americans who love the sport, they generally lead only to further frustration. The domestic efforts to address the sport we love tend to be either defensive (insisting over and over again that soccer is as worthy of adoration as baseball or football) or academic (trying to reason strangers to the game, hoping that, through education, they will come to understand and appreciate it). The European and Latin ones, though more enjoyable, ultimately serve only to reminds us of what we can never have. For the American soccer fan, then, Once in a Lifetime: The Incredible Story of the New York Cosmos is like a bolt of lightning on a sunny day: an explosion of sudden, blinding power that comes utterly out of nowhere, so unexpected that it leaves you breathless. It's a wide-eyed, delirious celebration of American soccer, the likes of which we've never seen. And it's indescribably wonderful, the kind of film that brings a smile to your face the moment it begins and doesn't let go. Directors Paul Crowder and John Dower clearly love soccer, and they revel in the insanity that was the New York Cosmos, the team that dominated the North American Soccer League (NASL) during its glory days of the late 1970's. Their passion and energy is in every frame of the film, and in combination with sharp editing (Crowder is an editor by trade), an irresistible soundtrack, and a clever, 70's inspired sensibility that touches everything from the movie's fonts to its music, they serve to make the film and its story irresistible.

The New York Cosmos were one of the best, most popular teams in the now-defunct North American Soccer League (NASL). Owned by Warner Brothers, the team could afford to bring in some of the world's greatest soccer players (among them Pele and German great, Franz Beckenbauer), albeit when they were generally past their prime. The story of the team - and the NASL in general - is a fascinating one to soccer dorks like myself, but the fact that a pair of major companies have actually acquired distribution rights to a Cosmos movie is sort of mind-blowing (in a very good way).

The movie, a GreenStreet Films/Passion Pictures production, is called Once in a Lifetime: The Extraordinary Story of the New York Cosmos and, thanks to Miramax, it will be hitting American theaters this spring. And, as if that isn't already exciting enough (trust me, it's exciting), ESPN shares the rights with Miramax, and hopes to air the movie on its channels this summer, in concert with coverage of the World Cup.

Man. What with Green Street Hooligans, Goal!, and now this, it's starting to look like Americans might...like soccer. Could it really be?