This A24 Film Could Win an Oscar in 2027

The upcoming A24 documentary Nuisance Bear has become a frontrunner at the 2027 Oscars in early predictions. Directed by Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman, the film tracks polar bears in the Canadian town of Churchill, Manitoba, but it isn’t the typical cuddly animal doc. A “nuisance bear” describes a bear that is unwelcome, entering residential areas while typically looking for food, and the movie follows how these animals are redirected or captured by wildlife officers. The documentary is being distributed by Mubi and is expected to release sometime in 2026, though it was featured at Sundance Film Festival earlier in the year.

Documentary Nuisance Bear is predicted to be an early favorite at the 2027 Oscars

Nuisance Bear is one of the frontrunners to win the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature in 2027, as based on a bet on Kalshi (as of June 10) on what films will be nominated in the category. However, the full results show that the A24 eco-documentary faces some stiff competition:

• Nuisance Bear (Gabriela Osio Vanden and Jack Weisman) – 39% chance
• One in a Million (Itab Azzam and Jack Macinnes) – 32%
• Musk (Alex Gibney) – 26%
• Sometimes, I Imagine Them All at a Part (Daniel Magnani-Hüller) – 24%
• Tutu (Sam Pollard) – 9%

These are still early predictions for an awards ceremony that will take place next year, so these results should be taken with a grain of salt. Still, looking at the full history of the bet, which started in March, Nuisance Bear has been in the lead or near the lead the vast majority of the time.

Early predictions from Variety identified the same five films above as potential nominees in the Oscar category, though it picked Musk over Nuisance Bear as its frontrunner. It also highlighted “The AI Doc: Or How I Became an Apocaloptimist” from Focus Features, a documentary that is streaming on Apple TV and Peacock, as another possible nominee.

That said, in Nuisance Bear’s favor, the film premiered at Sundance Film Festival on January 24 and won the U.S. Grand Jury Prize for a documentary. The jury said that “the film tells an enormous story with great drama, beauty, and verve and powerfully confronts the realities of climate change, the tensions between Indigenous tradition and Western capitalist encroachment, and the complexities of humanity’s relationship with the natural world.” The movie’s score is composed by Cristobal Tapia de Veer, who has several Emmys for his work on the critically acclaimed HBO series The White Lotus.

Critics who have seen the film at the festival were impressed with Nuisance Bear as well. The movie has a fantastic 97% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 33 reviews. Cory Woodroof for USA Today writes, “You can’t help but cheer for the bear at the film’s center to evade danger, but you also feel great empathy for a dynamic that clearly doesn’t work for human or bear alike.” Meanwhile, Matt Oakes for Silver Screen Riot praised the film’s beautiful scenic shots of nature: “The cinematography is quietly spectacular. Sweeping aerials of desolate tundra cut to close-up intimate shots of paws, snouts, and heavy breath crystallizing in the cold.”

The 90-minute documentary is an extension of Vanden and Weisman’s short documentary film of the same name that was released in 2021. This 14-minute film can be seen in full on YouTube, showing how polar bears who get too close to the town are approached by tourists on one hand (Churchill dubs itself as the “Polar Bear Capital of the World”) and wildlife officials on the other. Sometimes they are redirected with camera flashes, but in worst-case scenarios, they are tranquilized and airlifted in a net to a polar bear holding facility. While this short documentary doesn’t have a narrator, the longer A24 feature is sparsely narrated by an Inuit elder named Mike Tunalaaq Gibbons.

Source: Comingsoon.net