Now that Bill Gates has bought the education reform movement, can he buy them an Oscar to go with it?
Last Sunday night, the Gotham Independent Film Awardskicked off the 2010 film awards season with a much-deserved Best Feature prize to “Winter’s Bone” and a Best Documentary prize to “The Oath,” which focuses on two men associated with Osama bin Laden who were also prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Remarkably, four of the five films (including the winner, "The Oath") in the Gotham/IFP documentary category were not even among the fifteen already short-listed for the Oscars; only "Inside Job" among the five Gotham festival nominees made the cut for the Hollywood-driven Oscars.
The festival's documentary category outcome meant a surprise early season loss for the darling of the education reform movement, the heavily advertised and supported, Bill Gates backed “Waiting for Superman,” colloquially W4S. It's worth noting, by the way, that while the Independent Filmmaker