There was a fear that when A24 started taking on private equity money a few years ago, the studio’s creative license would suffer. We didn’t need to worry. In practice, its version of expansion and broadening has been the conceptual horror film “Backrooms,” directed by a virtual teenager at the time, or the bombastic “Marty Supreme,” a period film about a caddish ping-pong player. Both these unique films broke box office records for the company.
Looking at A24’s awards slate this year, the biggest proof that the company hasn’t lost its edge, but is continuing to gain it, is that the film that has the most festival crowds talking about isn’t its Julianne Moore musical comedy or its quirky rendition of “Big Daddy.” It’s a documentary about, of all things, the rich field of imprisoned Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes.
Part of the appeal of “You Can See Everything” has been the mystery surrounding it. Even those who knew that it was a secret movie premiering in Telluride 2026 were left out of key information about the film. So the hype for Nathan Fielder/Lance Oppenheim grew to the point that some viewers asked, “Could this be the first documentary to be nominated for Best Picture?”
That doesn’t mean Colorado mountain air gets to a lot of people’s heads, but it’s an uphill battle. Following its stellar premiere, reports quickly emerged that A24 was largely focused on a Best Picture campaign for the film because the Academy’s busy documentary branch might choose not to nominate it for Best Documentary Feature. They’ve done it before — just ask the producers of “Hoop Dreams” and “Roger & Me.”
IndieWire’s Anne Thompson summarized the challenge behind “You Can See Everything” or any documentary getting a Best Picture nomination and that’s because documentaries don’t often reach other branches. Yes, they are films that involve producers, cinematographers, editors, editors, sound, music, and even visual effects, but the biggest branch in the academy is actors, a group that is not employed in most documentaries.
Even with directors and writers branches, this is a challenge, because the leading directors and writers in the documentary world, who can advocate for their peers, are mostly members of the separate, above-mentioned documentary branch.
This does not mean that just because members of one’s branch were not involved in a film, for example, members of the Casting Directors Branch or the Makeup Artists and Hairstylists Branch do not watch documentaries or even vote for them. It’s just that most branches prefer scripted films, as they are the projects that members are most familiar with and are engaged in the greatest numbers.
And yet, there are plenty of examples of documentaries coming away as Oscar nominees in categories outside of Best Documentary Feature. Best Original Song is often one of those destinations, the most recent example being the 2025 documentary “Viva Verdi!” “Sweet Dreams of Joy”. Nominees for that category are determined by the music branch.
There are also several documentaries that have been submitted by a country for the Best International Feature Oscar, which is a category in which all Oscar voters are allowed to choose to participate, as long as they prove they have seen enough contenders. “Collective” (Romania) and “Flea” (Denmark) are two recent examples that have made it into both that category and Best Documentary Feature. The latter film was also nominated for Best Animated Feature, allowing it to tie the record for 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 be remiss if we didn’t bring up Michael Moore’s Palme d’Or winner “Fahrenheit 9/11,” which chose not to submit for Best Documentary Feature to begin the Best Picture campaign. Even with the momentum of winning the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature for “Bowling for Columbine” and the film’s huge box office success, Moore’s film failed to receive a nomination for the top award.
Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim are definitely filmmakers the industry should be excited about, and the word on “You Can See Everything” is that it Is The type of perturbations in the matrix that may affect the transformation. But the academy is running very slowly. And Fielder’s other experiments, like his take on the Showtime drama series “The Curse,” did not go unnoticed at the Emmys, another awards show voted on by industry peers. This suggests that filmmakers and artists are not as largely on the radar of the general public as the breathless media coverage suggests. At least not yet.
But considering that “You Can See Everything” is a film that delivers on the promise that “you’ve never seen anything like it before” in every way, it would be wrong to count it out completely. Without getting too deep into the politics of the documentary branch, which deserves its own article, a big indicator that the film will gain a foothold on the Oscar front is if, come early December, it triumphantly makes its way onto the Best Documentary Feature shortlist. If that happens, the power of “you can see everything” cannot be denied.