On Documentaries

Al Gore did not win an Oscar.
Director Davis Guggenheim and producers Lawrence Bender and Laurie David won the Academy Award for "Best Documentary." This in and of itself is a misnomer (in my opinion) because An Inconvenient Truth is not a documentary: any film that uses a Matt Groening clip about the ozone layer as a rhetorical device is immediately ineligible for documentary status.
It's bloody effective as propaganda, though.
Of course, this also applies to all of Michael Moore's past Oscar wins. Bowling for Columbine approached documentary territory, but with such a satiric cant that his intention was obvious. A film-nut friend tells me that documentaries are supposed to be persuasive these days, but I'm not willing to blur the line between propaganda and documentary enough to allow Moore. (If anything, Borat is more of a documentary than either Inconvenient Truth or Bowling for Columbine.)

Gore could have been nominated for "best actor in a full-length propaganda film," but there's no such category. Sorry, Al.