Documentary filmmakers deserve much more love and attention than they receive. One way to get more attention is to make the list of 15 documentaries short-listed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Variety has this year's list and cites three Iraq War-themed films as being "center stage": Phil Donahue and Ellen Spiro's Body of War, Charles Ferguson's No End in Sight (which Cinematical's Kim Voynar gave high marks when it played at Sundance) and Richard Robbins' Operation Homecoming: Writing the Wartime Experience.

Kim is a self-styled "documentary dork" -- her words, not mine -- and wrote a column two months ago about films she thought "have (or ought to have) a shot at Oscar gold." She included No End in Sight, as well as the following docs that all made the short list: Sean Fine and Andrea Nix-Fine's War/Dance, Michael Moore's Sicko, Daniel Karslake's For the Bible Tells Me So, and Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman's Nanking. Kim was pulling for Logan Smalley's Darius Goes West, which sadly did not make the list. Other notable exclusions included David Singleton's In the Shadow of the Moon and Seth Gordon's The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters.

Here are the remaining eight that did make the list. First, the ones we've covered so far: Tony Kaye's Lake of Fire, Richard Berge and Bonni Cohen's The Rape of Europa, Weijun Chen's Please Vote for Me and Peter Raymont's A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman. Next, the ones we haven't seen yet: Steven Okazaki's White Light/Black Rain: The Destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which has played on HBO), Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side (due for release in January), Bill Haney's The Price of Sugar and Tricia Regan's Autism: The Musical.

Now the Academy's Documentary Branch will review the 15 films and narrow the list still further to the final five nominees, which will be announced on January 22.

I just got a note from Barbara Smalley, mother of Darius Goes West director Logan Smalley, that the little documentary that could (which is, as I've previously raved, one my my fave indie films of the year) won both the Best Documentary (juried) award and yet another audience award at the Sidewalk Moving Picture Film Festival, which just wrapped. I've lost track at this point of how many audience awards Darius has won, but I think it's worth noting that the film was up against some tough competition for the juried award; other films competing in that category included The Devil Came on Horseback and For the Bible Tells Me So, either one of which could end up on the Oscar shortlist.

Barbara reports that Darius Weems and twelve of his friends attended the fest, held in Birmingham, Alabama, that Saturday night's screening at the Civil Rights Institute's theater was standing room only, with people turned away, and that the film got a standing ovation at the end. When one of Darius's friends mentioned Darius had just turned 18 on Thursday, the crowd sang him "Happy Birthday." What a nice reception for a great film and a great young man.

I hope the good folks at the Academy are paying attention to this film. With the remarkable audience response it's generated at fest after fest this year, Darius Goes West deserves Oscar consideration, and I hope it gets it. If you've not yet had a chance to catch the film yourself, you have lots of opportunities coming up. The film is slated to play six fests in the near future, and also has a 14-city tour that just started. Check the film's official website to see if Darius is rolling into a theater near you, and if it is, don't miss the chance to catch it.

Get more info on Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy, which Darius is fighting, right here, and on Charley's Fund, the designated charity for profits from the film, over on the Charley's Fund website.

The Toronto International Film Festival is over, we have a couple months respite before Sundance, so naturally thoughts turn to the Oscar race. While I'm as curious as anyone else which films will end up garnering the big nod (and I will be really surprised if Juno doesn't get a few noms, especially for screenwriting), as an indie girl I'm most interested in the docs and foreigns. I'm a documentary dork, and one of the things I most look forward to covering at any given film fest is the doc slate -- which, as both David Poland and Anne Thompson have noted in post-Toronto columns, have been weak this year relative to the past couple years. No one really seems to be sure why this is, exactly, although the surprising success of March of the Penguins in 2005 fueled an interest in documentaries that led, perhaps, to a bit of a glut.

The trouble with documentaries is that, penguin love aside, docs are not something your average person is going to go out of their way to shell out ten bucks to see at a theater. Rent from the video store or add to your Netflix queue, perhaps, but when you're looking for a film to see on date night, the depressing topics that tend to make up much of the available documentary fare are not really the first thing that comes to mind. When's the last time you said, "Hey, honey, I know what to do tonight -- let's get dinner at that place over in Little Italy we like, and then let's go see that new Iraq war doc!" Given a choice between a bummer doc and, say, Superbad, most folks are going to opt for the laughs over the conscience-pricking dose of reality.