Good Night Oppy topped the winners for the 7th annual Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards. The film by Ryan White won five honours, including the gold Critics’ Choice Documentary Award for Best Feature. The awards, handed out Sunday night, gave runner-up prizes to Sara Dosa’s Fire of Love and Daniel Roher’s Navanly in the Best Documentary Feature category with placements of silver and bronze, respectively.
White also won the prize for Best Director, along with Best Science or Nature Documentary. Good Night Oppy tells the story of Mars rovers Spirit and Opportunity and their mission that captivated the world. The film features groundbreaking special effects sequences that recreate the Martian landscape with photorealism conjured by Industrial Light & Magic. The doc also won Best Narration for voiceover by Angela Bassett, although in an interview with POV on Friday, White ironically said that he doesn’t consider her a “narrator,” so to speak. The film features text drawn from NASA’s mission logs, which Bassett reads dramatically to underscore the actions of the rovers on Mars and the humans guiding the mission on Earth. Good Night Oppy is currently in theatres and debuts on Prime Video November 23.
Other winners at the Critics’ Choice Documentary Awards included the Canadian duo Jack Weisman and Gabriela Osio Vanden, whose film Nuisance Bear won Best Documentary Short. The film observes changes in polar bear migration habits amid climate change. Peter Jackson’s Beatles doc Get Back, meanwhile, won two awards including Best Music Documentary.
The full list of Critics’ Choice Documentary Award winners is as follows:
BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE – Gold
Good Night Oppy (Amazon Studios)
BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE – Silver
Fire of Love (National Geographic Documentary Films/Neon)
BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE – Bronze
Navalny (HBO/CNN/Warner Bros. Pictures)
BEST DIRECTOR
Ryan White – Good Night Oppy (Amazon Studios)
BEST FIRST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
David Siev – Bad Axe (IFC Films)
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
The Cinematography Team – Our Great National Parks (Netflix)
BEST EDITING
Brett Morgen – Moonage Daydream (Neon/HBO Documentary Films)
BEST SCORE
Blake Neely – Good Night Oppy (Amazon Studios)
BEST NARRATION
Good Night Oppy (Amazon Studios)
Written by Helen Kearns, Ryan White; Performed by Angela Bassett
BEST ARCHIVAL DOCUMENTARY
Fire of Love (National Geographic Documentary Films/Neon)
BEST HISTORICAL DOCUMENTARY
Descendant (Netflix)
BEST BIOGRAPHICAL DOCUMENTARY
Sidney (Apple TV+)
BEST MUSIC DOCUMENTARY
The Beatles: Get Back (Disney+)
BEST POLITICAL DOCUMENTARY
Navalny (HBO Max/CNN Films/Warner Bros. Pictures)
BEST SCIENCE/NATURE DOCUMENTARY
Good Night Oppy (Amazon Studios)
BEST SPORTS DOCUMENTARY
Welcome to Wrexham (FX/Hulu)
BEST SHORT DOCUMENTARY
Nuisance Bear (The New Yorker)
BEST LIMITED DOCUMENTARY SERIES
The Beatles: Get Back (Disney+)
BEST ONGOING DOCUMENTARY SERIES
30 for 30 (ESPN)
