March Madness: ‘Hoop Dreams’ vs. Starting Five : Commentary: If the acclaimed documentary wasn’t good enough to make the Oscar cut, how good are the ones that did? A scorecard.

Like most film critics, I fully expected “Hoop Dreams” would be nominated for the best documentary feature Oscar. The motion picture academy’s documentary committee has a history of being--shall we say--eccentric, and its members are not exactly boosters of experimentalism. (Or commercialism--as opposed to the rest of the academy, where commercial success tends to confer prestige.)

Still, the documentary voters have also honored or nominated some of the most interesting and insurgent documentaries of the past decade, including Barbara Kopple’s “American Dream,” “The Life and Times of Harvey Milk,” “Berkeley in the ‘60s,” “The Panama Deception,” “Eyes on the Prize” and “Let’s Get Lost.” The documentary committee is probably no more flagrantly erroneous in its choices than the other sectors of the academy.

If that’s any consolation.

True, “Hoop Dreams” is, alas, a commercial success, but it’s also straight-arrow and conventionally uplifting and socially conscious--it’s superlatively PC. No dramatic re-enactments a la Errol Morris’ “Thin Blue Line,” no dubious time-sequence juggling a la Michael Moore’s “Roger & Me,” no flouncy transvestites to offend anyone’s tender sensibilities a la “Paris Is Burning”--to name the three most recent earlier significant omissions in the What’s Up Doc brigade. “Hoop Dreams” was a shoo-in.

When the other shoo dropped it turned out “Hoop Dreams”--directed by Steve James, Frederick Marx and Peter Gilbert, with editing assistance from Bill Haugse--had indeed been bypassed. And not only “Hoop Dreams.” You won’t find Ross McElwee’s idiosyncratic personal memoir “Time Indefinite” in the nominees’ circle--virtually unknown, it was the most complexly moving film I saw last year. Also absent is Terry Zwigoff’s “Crumb,” which opens locally in April--it’s a startling piece of American Gothic about the almost comically horrific family of underground artist Robert Crumb.

What makes some of these omissions even more galling is that at least one of the films may not even have had a fair shake. According to a reliable source, “Crumb” was turned off by the documentary committee after about 25 to 30 minutes at its official screening. The opening credits run about four minutes. So the committee saw only 20-some minutes of a movie its highly regarded director spent almost nine years putting together.

But what about the five films that did make it into the nominees’ circle this year? The righteous indignation of the “Hoop”/”Crumb” contingent is tempered by the fact that most of the righteous haven’t seen all five of the current nominees.

I did. Here’s my report (in order of preference):

“Freedom on My Mind”--The Mississippi Voter Registration Project (1961-64) has been dealt with in documentaries before, most notably on “Eyes on the Prize,” but here it unfolds with an almost novelistic richness, drawing on present-day interviews as well as an astonishing confluence of rare newsreel footage, still photos, home movies and archival material. Co-directors Connie Field and Marilyn Mulford show how the black sharecroppers and maids in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964 worked together with white college students to register some 80,000 members of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.

Field and Mulford work from the inside out, demonstrating in first-hand interviews the ways in which many Mississippi blacks were wary of the Freedom Riders (no black church would receive them). It gets at the racial and class tensions between them, and the fascinations between them too. (Many of the blacks had never eaten with whites before; most of the whites had never used outhouses.)

It shows how someone like the hyperarticulate Bob Moses, one of the leaders of the registration, could flinch at sending people into the violent fray, and then send them out anyway--because they must go. It argues--not entirely convincingly--that the bitter failure of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to unseat the all-white segregationist Dixiecrats at Atlantic City was the root cause of the massive disillusionment of both black and white progressives that led them to reject the Democratic Party, factionalize and work underground.

It gives us a gallery of almost folkloric characters, like Endesha Ida Mae Holland, whose chuckling fortitude seems to come from some place beyond reason. Raped at 11 by a white employer, she dropped out of school and drifted into prostitution. During the civil rights struggle, her mother was killed when the family house burned to the ground. Holland at first welcomed the Freedom Riders as a busload of potential tricks, but she took up the movement and it transformed her life. She talks about a day when integration finally came to Mississippi and she kept ordering more food in a restaurant from a white waitress because she had never heard a white person call her “Ma’am” before and she couldn’t stop smiling. She’s now a college professor with a Ph.D and a playwright.

“A Great Day in Harlem”--Produced by Jean Bach and Matthew Seig, and edited by Susan Peehl, this is a wingding deconstruction of the famous Art Kane 1959 Esquire photograph of 58 of the greatest jazz musicians of the era gathered outside a row of brownstones on 126th Street. (The miracle is that all these cantankerous night owls could make it to a 10 a.m. shoot.)

The filmmakers located home movies that were also taken at the photo shoot; work in sequences from the TV special “Sound of Jazz,” where many of the same jazz artists jammed, and interview many of the participants, including Dizzy Gillespie, Gerry Mulligan, Sonny Rollins and Art Blakey (some of whom have since died). It’s a frolicsome quicksilver piece of work that gives off the same goosey pleasure as a good jazz session.

“Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision”--Freida Lee Mock’s portrait of the young architect is best when it focuses on how Lin was inspired to create some of her most famous works, like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, or the Civil Rights Memorial in Montgomery, Ala. The film is intelligent and deftly made, though Lin never really emerges full-fledged. She offers up an authorized view of herself, speaking in elevated sonorities, like someone running for office. She seems to be conspiring in her own testimonial.

“D-day Remembered”--Charles Guggenheim’s film about the Normandy invasion is a compact compilation of occasionally extraordinary archival footage, much of which seems freshly chosen. (Not like the kind of stuff that keeps turning up on A&E--a; comedian friend calls it “The Hitler Channel.”) Invasion survivors provide voice-over commentary, and there are some choice remembrances. Example: What did the Brits call the American soldiers in England? “Overpaid, oversexed and over here.” The film doesn’t provide any new perspective on the war, though. It comes across as basically a superior example of the kind of war documentary that ends up on permanent exhibition in a museum--as, indeed, it will in 1997, at the National D-day Museum in New Orleans.

“Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter”--Writer-director Deborah Hoffmann recorded the progression of her mother’s Alzheimer’s disease from the first confusing symptoms to the nursing home. Hoffmann attempts a jaunty, spoofy tone, with cute little title cards cluing us into her mother’s various manic spells--like her serial obsession with dentist appointments, bananas, Lorna Doones and hearing aids. The smiling-through-tears levity wears thin because we can sense there’s more rage and despair in this situation--from both mother and daughter--than the filmmaker has allowed for. The result is a glib comfort.

*

Does all this convince you that “Hoop Dreams” was shafted? See for yourself. You have a chance to view all the nominated docs, both features and shorts, on March 25 during “Docu-Day” at Paramount Pictures Studio Theater, 5555 Melrose Ave., beginning at 11 a.m. Call (213) 466-FILM, ext. 115, for schedule details. (Single admission $7; all-day pass $25.)

Meantime, the righteous have called for the reconstitution, or the outright elimination, of the documentary committee.

But there’s another way. “Hoop Dreams” received its sole Oscar nomination this year in the editing category.

Next year why not just have the editors’ branch of the academy vote on the documentaries?