If the Academy Awards have any interest in preserving their legitimacy—or even basic credibility—they must consider rescinding the Oscar handed to “No Other Land” for Best Documentary. To do otherwise would not only reward a flagrant distortion of the truth but would confirm what many have long suspected: that the Academy has abandoned even the pretense of valuing journalistic integrity in favor of political pandering.
To understand how disastrous this is, one need only glance at the rules of the Academy’s Documentary Branch, which explicitly mandate that a documentary should be “nonfiction” and provide an emphasis on “fact and not fiction.”