Despite producer controvery and strong competition from Food, Inc, Â The Cove won the Oscar for best documentary.
Reaction to the win:
“The Cove” is the unsurprising winner for best documentary, beating out the other socially conscious picture “Food, Inc.” More controversial: One of the winners holds up a save-the-dolphins text-message number onstage, which seems like a pretty clear infraction of the academy’s no-promotion rules for the podium, even if it is a promotion for a good cause. @LA Times
An Oscar win by “The Cove,” a documentary chronicling bloody dolphin hunting in a Japanese fishing town, could give the film the critical audience its makers wanted to reach: ordinary moviegoers in Japan.
News that the movie won the Academy Award for best feature documentary was greeted with surprise in Japan because many Japanese hadn’t heard of it. The U.S. film, directed by former National Geographic photographer Louie Psihoyos, hasn’t been shown in commercial theaters in Japan except for a single viewing during the Tokyo International Film Festival in October.
Japanese theaters have stayed away from it because of protests from the town of Taiji, a fishing town of 3,800 people in Western Japan that bills itself as the “birthplace of Japan’s commercial whaling.” The town’s officials requested the film’s Japanese distributor drop it, saying it was shot without permission of its people and constituted libel. @Wall Street Journal
“The Cove” edges out “Food, Inc.” Both films will be useful to aliens in explaining why our species deserved to go extinct. @tildology