And the Brits are conspicuous in the best documentary category, with nominations for Exit Through The Gift Shop, Restrepo, and Waste Land.
For Agnès Varda, the blend of fiction and documentary has always been crucial and conspicuous, as in her 1967 documentary "Uncle Yanco" (the Criterion Channel on FilmStruck) — a personal story about her first meeting, in Sausalito, with her artist cousin Jean Yancoo) Varda, who lived there on a houseboat in what he calls "aquatic suburbia".
Much of the action is displaced to Facebook and text messages, and the conspicuous dubbing of voices throughout gives this vertiginous, documentary-style comedy the air of a live-action cartoon.
Just as shameful, if less conspicuous, is home video's almost complete neglect of Mr. Antonioni's television and documentary work: nowhere to be found outside Italy are his pioneering three-part documentary on China, Chung Kuo — Cina, made for Italian television in 1972; his experimental video feature Il Mistero di Oberwald (1981), or his more recent documentary shorts.
Conspicuous by their absence in "Countdown to Zero," these four men are the headliners of another pro-disarmament documentary titled "Nuclear Tipping Point," produced by the Nuclear Threat Initiative, a group founded by Mr. Nunn and Ted Turner.
After two hours of dense beards, photographed in pseudo-documentary half-light, I would have given much for an eyepatch or, indeed, any other conspicuous sign that this film was made for a living audience.
And the six sketches of "Paisan" — with their blend of fiction and documentary, politics and romance, comedy and melodrama — suggest another element of Rossellini's realism: aesthetic freedom, the conspicuous independence from conventions that makes the director a thinking visual presence and the camera his or her surrogate.
But as much as Lauren Greenfield's latest documentary, Generation Wealth, exposes the heights of excess abroad, the crux of her focus is how mired conspicuous consumption is with the myth of the American Dream.
As the introduction to the accompanying booklet to the documentary series states: "They promise us physical as well as social mobility and furnish us with the most conspicuous form of personal adornment after the clothes we stand up in".
But Gibney's documentary We Steal Secrets: the Story of WikiLeaks is first out of the gate – though the central subject is conspicuous by his absence.
