Matt Walsh bashed the Academy Awards gurus for snubbing his successful Am I Racist? documentary when it announced an initial pool of 15 documentaries that will be whittled down to five nominees.
“Am I Racist? did not make the top 15 even though it is the highest-grossing doc of the decade and easily the most talked about, most watched, and most influential documentary of this year,” Walsh told his 3.4 million followers on X. “This is the outcome I expected, of course, but it doesn’t make it any less of a farce.” No documentary has grossed this much since a 2018 documentary on Mister Rogers.
“If a conservative can make a documentary that crushes every other film in its genre that year and beats every film in its genre in the past 6 or 7 years, and yet still not even crack the top 15, that means that conservatives are simply excluded from having their work recognized. Again, this is not a surprise. But that’s what it means,” Walsh added.
Walsh concluded, “One thing I’ve learned after getting into filmmaking is that the Left truly believes it owns the art of filmmaking. Any conservative who makes a film is an intruder, a sinister usurper showing up in a place where he doesn’t belong. The truth is that the success of my films — and they are both easily the most watched and influential documentaries of the decade — actually makes it LESS likely that they’ll be recognized by critics or awards. Our success is an affront to them. They hate us for it.”
Walsh later linked to a Vanity Fair article lamenting the rise of conservative documentaries. “2024’s top 10 is a hodgepodge of faith-oriented films, a movie in praise of Donald Trump, and glorified trolls clearly intended to appeal to those on the starboard side of moderate.” One reason is Fathom Events, which holds special screenings and helps theaters "put butts in seats" on weeknights.
Fathom has taken advantage of struggling theaters by slotting in films like Jesus Thirsts: The Miracle of the Eucharist, a movie in praise of the Catholic faith that boasts one of Mark Wahlberg’s brothers as a producer. Unless something happens in the next two weeks, it will close out the year as the third-most-popular nonfiction film at the box office, just behind Piece by Piece, Pharrell Williams’s LEGO-infused bio-documentary.
Another Fathom release, The Ark and the Darkness, claims to prove that the Biblical account of an all-encompassing flood (the ark in the title is Noah’s, not Indiana Jones’s) is true. It’s being counted as the fifth-highest-grossing documentary of the year.
Daily Wire co-CEO Jeremy Boreing said, “I, of course, knew we would get snubbed—I knew that there was no chance that we would win an Academy Award for this film. But I actually am fairly shocked that we weren’t on the short list. You have not only the biggest box office success that a documentary has had this year, or in the last two years or in the last three…and the left couldn't bring themselves to even acknowledge that it was a possible contender.”
