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The Answer Sheet
By Valerie Strauss

Why Oscar snubbed ‘Superman’ -- deservedly so

The documentarians who select the films for Academy Award nominations in the feature documentary category got it right: “Waiting for Superman” was not good/accurate enough to be selected.

The snub to Davis Guggenheim’s tendentious film was well-deserved, given that classic documentaries are factual and straightforward, and don’t, as did "Superman," fake scenes for emotional impact.

Academy Award nominations are heavily political, yet this film didn’t make the cut even though President Obama called it “powerful” and welcomed to the White House the five charming students who starred in the film.

Advertising campaigns have been known to vault films into Academy contention, but not even a $2 million grant provided by the Gates Foundation to market “Superman” worked.

Though "Superman" was on the shortlist for an Academy Award in the feature documentary category, apparently the people who vote on the nominations -- people who actually make documentaries -- saw too many problems with “Waiting for Superman.”

And there are many, large and small.

Guggenheim edited the film to make it seem as if charter schools are a systemic answer to the ills afflicting many traditional public schools, even though they can’t be, by their very design. He unfairly demonized Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and gave undeserved hero status to reformer and former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee. Guggenheim compared schools in Finland and the United States without mentioning that Finland has a 3 percent child poverty rate and the United States has a 22 percent rate.

One scene showed a mother touring a charter school -- and saying things such as, “I don’t care if we have to wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning in order to get there at 7:45, then that’s what we will do” -- that turned out to be staged; she already knew her son didn’t get in, according to The New York Times.

Then there was the case of one of the five students featured in the film, Emily Jones, who lives on the suburban San Francisco Peninsula and who, according to "Superman," was desperate to escape her traditional public high school, Woodside High, where she would be doomed to mediocrity.

Except that it wasn’t true. In an interview with John Fensterwald of the Silicon Valley Education Foundation, she said that Woodside “is a great school” that she really liked; she just liked Summit Prep Charter School better.

Late last year, in a piece on Movie Line’s Web site, editor S.T. VanAirsdale asked whether education historian Diane Ravitch’s scathing review of Superman in The New York Review of Books would derail the movie’s chances of nabbing an Oscar.

Just maybe it did.

And maybe this will help persuade those who believed that "Superman" unflinchingly showed reality that, in fact, it didn't, and that it is time to take a new look at public education that doesn't demonize teachers and traditional public schools.

(For the record, the films that did get nominations in the feature documentary category are: Exit through the Gift Shop,Gasland, Inside Job, Restrepo and Waste Land.)

CAT Tracks Editor's Note:

Below you will find a "postmortem" from mid-December 2010 of the commercial success of 'WFS'...

From the EducationNext.org Website...

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Waiting For Superman: A Postmortem

By Frederick Hess
12/17/2010

(This post also appears at Rick Hess Straight Up.)

Earlier this fall, there was lots of excitement about Waiting For Superman. It was the talk of the town for a bit, prompted NBC to discover education for a week, and made a school reform icon out of director Davis Guggenheim. In the aftermath, though, Guggenheim has taken shots for some questionable factual assertions and a scene in which he apparently inserted a manufactured shot for emotional impact (very Broadcast News).

The movie is now finishing its theatrical run, dribbling out of the last few theaters. How big a splash did it make? As of December 13, the flick had done $6.4 million in the box office. That translates to something like 800,000 tickets, and makes it the 143rd ranked movie in the past 365 days. It finished third in domestic receipts among 2010 documentaries, trailing Babies and Oceans. All-time–in what had to be dispiriting for Guggenheim, director of the very successful An Inconvenient Truth–Waiting For Superman ranks 19th in domestic box office sales among documentaries (and, unlike with Babies or Oceans, the international appeal of WFS is almost nonexistent). Its $6.4 million haul lagged the domestic performance of top-performing documentary Fahrenheit 9/11 ($119.2 million), Tupac: Resurrection (#16 at $7.7 million), and Babies (#17 at $7.3 million).

The weak numbers are especially surprising given the substantial push WFS got from major media, the school reform community, and ardent efforts to encourage potential viewers to sign a pledge that they’d see the movie. In fact, the Gates Foundation gave Participant Media $2 million for “a social action campaign” intended to complement Paramount Pictures’ marketing campaign, a sum that amounted to nearly a third of the film’s total box office.

Guggenheim tried real hard this fall to argue that anyone who regards WFS as an assault on teacher unions is missing the point. I’m all in favor of beating up on the unions when they deserve it (which, to my mind, is often); what rankles me is the apologia that crept into Guggenheim’s tone. On the conservative Hugh Hewitt show he explained, “You know, I come, I’m a Democrat. I’m a lefty. You know, I’m a member of a great union, the Directors Guild of America. So I actually believe that unions have a good and important place in society, and they should be there to protect their teachers.” Strikes me that, if he thought that would placate teachers, he must not have learned much about the edu-space while making his movie or else didn’t recognize how the film came across.

Finally, my favorite part of the whole WFS phenomenon was the simple-minded insistence that “we know what works,” and that it’s “great teachers.” Guggenheim told us, “It’s not some magic; it’s about having a commitment to making great teachers in this country.” And again: “The solution is great teachers. The high-performing charters have great teachers.” And again: “As complicated as we have made [the debate], it boils down to what parents already know: It’s all about great teachers, it’s all about who’s standing in front of the kids every morning.”

Glad we got THAT settled. Time to go fix higher ed! Next film: “Waiting For My Disinterested Professor at My Overpriced College to Teach Me Something.”