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There were fears that when A24 started taking private equity money a few years ago, the studio’s creative license would take a big hit. We needn’t have worried. In practice, his version of heightening and going wider is the conceptual horror film “Backrooms,” directed at the time by a virtual teenager, or the bomb “Marty Supreme”, a period film about a caddish ping-pong player. Both of these idiosyncratic films broke box office records for the company.
Looking at the A24 awards slate this year, the biggest proof that the company has not lost its edge, but has continued to take advantage of it, is that its film that is the most talked about by the festival crowd is not its Julianne Moore musical comedy, or the most crazy one on “Big Daddy”. It’s a documentary about, of all things, the well-publicized territory of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes, who was imprisoned.
Part of the appeal of “You Can See Everything” is the mystery surrounding it. Even those in the know about Telluride 2026’s secret first movie were out of the loop on details about the movie. So the hype for Nathan Fielder / Lance Oppenheim is moving to the point that some viewers are asking “Is this the first documentary nominated for Best Picture?”
Not to say that the Colorado mountain air got to too many people’s heads, but it’s an uphill battle. After its electronic premiere, reports quickly surfaced that the A24 is largely targeting a Best Picture campaign for the film as the Academy’s fictitious Documentary Branch may choose not to nominate it for Best Documentary Feature. They’ve done it before — just ask the makers of “Hoop Dreams” and “Roger & Me.”
IndieWire’s Anne Thompson has detailed the challenge behind “You Can See Everything” or any documentary getting a Best Picture nomination and that’s because documentaries often don’t cross over to other branches. Yes, they are films with producers, cinematographers, editors, editors, sound, music, even visual effects involved in them, but the largest branch of the Academy is Actors, a group that most documentaries do not employ.
Even with the branches of the Directors and Writers, it is a challenge, because the main directors and writers in the documentary world, who could claim for their peers, are mostly members of the respective Documentary Branch, which was mentioned.
This is not to say that, just because members of their branch were not involved in a film, that members of the Casting Directors branch or the Makeup Artists and Hairstylists branch, for example, will not watch or even vote for documentaries. It’s just that most branches are for scripted films, because those are the projects he’s most familiar with and are hired at the most.
And yet, there are plenty of examples of documentaries emerging as Oscar nominees in categories outside of Best Documentary Feature. The best original song is often one of those destinations, with the most recent example being “Sweet Dreams of Joy” from the 2025 documentary “Viva Verdi!” The nominees for that category are decided by the Music Branch.
There are also several documentaries that have applied from a country for the Best International Feature Oscar, which is a category in which all Oscar voters are allowed to participate, as long as they prove that they have seen enough of the competitors. “Collective” (Romania) and “Flee” (Denmark) are two recent examples that made it into that category and best documentary feature. The latter film was also a Best Animated Feature nominee, allowing it to tie the most Oscar nominations for a documentary (the other record holder was “Woodstock,” which was nominated for Best Documentary Feature, Best Sound, and Best Editing in 1971).
We’d also be remiss if we didn’t mention Michael Moore’s Palme d’Or winner “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which chose not to submit for Best Documentary Feature to launch a Best Picture campaign. Even with the trend of just winning an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for “Bowling for Columbine” and the film’s massive box office success, Moore’s film failed to win a top prize nomination.
Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim are absolutely filmmakers the industry should be excited about, and the word on “You Can See Everything” is that Yes the kind of glitch in the matrix that affects change. But the Academy is moving very slowly. And Fielder’s other experiments, like the Showtime drama series “The Curse,” went unnoticed at the Emmys, another awards show voted on by industry peers. That suggests that the filmmaker and performer is not on the public’s radar as much as the breathless media suggests. At least not yet.
But considering “You Can See Everything” is a film that by all accounts delivers on the “You Can See Everything” promise, it would be wrong to count it out entirely. Without going too deep into the politics of the Documentary Branch, which deserves its own article, it would be a big sign of the film’s legs on Oscar’s face if, in early December, it triumphantly makes its way onto the Best Documentary Feature shortlist. If that happens, the power of “You Can See Everything” may not be denied.
