Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man isn't on the Academy Awards shortlist. This NYT story explains why.

An excerpt:

Why, then, did Werner Herzog's much-admired "Grizzly Man" not make the cut? The film, about the naturalist and ecologist Timothy Treadwell, who was killed by the same Alaskan grizzly bears that he studied, was chosen best nonfiction film last month by the New York Film Critics Circle.

Simple explanation, said the documentarian Arthur Dong, a member of both the documentary executive committee and the academy's board of governors: "It didn't get enough votes." He explained that volunteers from the documentary branch conducted initial screenings of all eligible films, voted and put their highest vote-getters on the shortlist.

How many volunteers? Mr. Dong referred the question to the academy's publicity office. A spokeswoman there declined to answer. So it could be two people? she was asked. "I hope not," she answered. For years, accusations of cronyism and bad taste plagued the selection of Oscar documentaries - in the 1990's, films that were denied nominations included the epic basketball documentary "Hoop Dreams"; "Crumb," the portrait of the maverick cartoonist R. Crumb; the true-crime documentary "Brother's Keeper"; Michael Moore's debut, "Roger & Me"; and "The Thin Blue Line," in which Errol Morris (who finally won for his 2003 documentary "The Fog of War") dismantled the case against a man on death row in Texas.

Moreover, films with Holocaust or other Jewish themes were seen to have a lock on the category: Between 1995 and 2000, the winners included "Anne Frank Remembered," three other Holocaust films - "The Long Way Home," "The Last Days" and "Into the Arms of Strangers: Stories of the Kindertransport" - and "One Day in September," about the 1972 Munich Olympics murders. "There are not many sure things in life, but that was a sure thing," Spike Lee said in 1998, when his "4 Little Girls" - about the 1963 Birmingham church bombing - lost to "The Long Way Home."

What Mr. Morris once referred to as the "Mother Teresa school of filmmaking" - the perception that if a film's subject is exemplary, the film must be, too - has always held sway at the academy. So has the voters' penchant for movies about the mentally or physically disabled. This year seems no different: both "Unknown White Male," about a man who loses his memory, and "Murderball," a forceful movie about wheelchair-bound rugby players, are on the shortlist. So is "39 Pounds of Love," about the painfully wizened Ami Ankilewitz, a victim of spinal muscular atrophy, who seeks to travel across the United States. It is said to be his long-held dream, but there is nothing in the film that does not feel stage-managed.