Oscars narrow documentaries to 15 contenders
From peter David

LOS ANGELES—Oscar voters named 15 documentaries on Wednesday to the short list of films vying for Academy Award nominations, including global warming movie “An Inconvenient Truth” with former U.S. vice president Al Gore.
Other documentaries range from “Deliver Us from Evil,” which tells of sexual abuse by a Catholic priest, to “Shut Up and Sing,” which follows country singers The Dixie Chicks after they criticized the Iraq war and President George W. Bush.
Several films about the war hit the list including “The Ground Truth,” about soldiers returning home, and “Iraq in Fragments,” which looks at how the war has impacted Iraqis.
Another notable “doc” is “Jesus Camp,” which tells of a summer school for Christian evangelicals. Co-directors Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing of New York’s Loki Films called it “the ultimate recognition” to be singled out by their peers at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. In recent years, documentaries have increasingly earned screen time in mainstream movie theatres as the storytelling of non-fiction films has become more like fictional films.
As a result, the box office tallies for these movies has been rising. “Inconvenient Truth” raked in $23.8 million in U.S. —Agencies