The Envelope: Oscars preview/Documentaries

In “Nightcrawler,” Jake Gyllenhaal plays a man whose drive for success leads him to do despicable things.

It’s notoriously hard to predict which feature documentaries will end up as the film academy’s final five nominees, but surveying the field, one thing is clear: It’s been an extraordinary year for nonfiction on-screen.

There is a long-running misconception that members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences love only underdog biopics, literary adaptations and anything in which Meryl Streep speaks with an accent.

Award consultants have finished their scouting reports. The movies have been set and ranked.

Chadwick Boseman hit it out of the park last year with his quietly riveting performance as Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier in “42.”

Some hotels inspire travel postcards, but it was actual hand-tinted travel postcards called Photochroms that were part of the inspiration for “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”

When director David Fincher cast Rosamund Pike in “Gone Girl,” he asked that she model her performance as the movie’s mysterious missing wife, Amy Elliott-Dunne, not on another actress or well-known icon but on Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, the willowy blond bride of John F.

In 1988, along with 10 million others, I spent several days trying to decipher, decode and demystify “A Brief History of Time” by professor Stephen Hawking, the world-renowned physicist.

It was 2006, and documentarians Allison Berg and Frank Keraudren had just seen their main character succumb to cancer.

Bucking the trend, several genre movies have won the best picture Oscar.

Getting rabid Chicago Bulls fan Gene Siskel to see “Hoop Dreams” was easy enough, but talking fellow film critic Roger Ebert into slotting a three-hour sports-focused documentary into his Sundance schedule was no mean feat.