The Academy just announced its short list for the Best Documentary Oscar, anointing the fifteen films still in the running for the award. It’s a strong year in the category, a fact reflected in the films that did and didn’t make the cut. Client 9, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Gasland, Inside Job, Restrepo, The Tillman Story, and Waiting for ‘Superman’ are some of the lucky fifteen. Less lucky are Piece of Work, about Joan Rivers; A Film Unfinished, about an unfinished propaganda film from the Warsaw Ghetto (a direct flouting of Ricky Gervais’s law of Oscar!); Catfish; nuclear-arms survey Countdown to Zero; and Errol Morris’s Tabloid, which are now out of the race. And thus the opportunity to watch Joan Rivers interview herself about what she’s wearing on the red carpet at the Oscars is, sadly, lost. [Media Decoder/NYT]