You Can See Everything Deemed Ineligible For A Major Award On The Road To The Oscars

This article contains spoilers for "You Can See Everything."

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's documentary about disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes and her husband Billy Evans, "You Can See Everything," has taken the world (and the box office) by storm. But if you've seen it, you know it's not a simple documentary. It blurs the line of narrative filmmaking — all part of the doc's ultimate conclusion of how hard, if not impossible, it is to truly understand someone by placing a camera in front of them.

Fielder and Oppenheim enlisted actress Amanda Seyfried, who played Holmes in the 2022 miniseries "The Dropout," to join the project. Seyfried doesn't just appear in unscripted moments with Fielder (like a nesting doll sequence where Seyfried watches Holmes watching "The Dropout"), she gets back into character as Holmes in recreations of moments during the production that Fielder and Oppenheim didn't or couldn't film, like the initial meetings to make the documentary (where Christopher Abbott plays Billy), and Fielder's final talk with Holmes in a Texas prison.

The rapturous reception and format-blending of "You Can See Everything" have prompted conversations about whether the movie should be eligible for nominations for Academy Awards categories that typically exclude documentaries. In particular, there's been a movement to nominate Seyfried for Best Supporting Actress, and Variety recently confirmed that A24 was indeed submitting Seyfried for that prize, as well as submitting the film in categories like Best Picture and Best Director.

But the hopes for Oscar glory have just been complicated. Variety now reports that "You Can See Everything" will not be competing for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Theatrical Feature Film at the Directors Guild of America (DGA) Awards because documentaries are ineligible for that award. Instead, it will only compete in the Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Documentary category at the DGAs.

Here's why that matters.

As Variety notes, the DGA award is typically considered a bellwether for the Best Director winner at the Academy Awards. Since the beginning of the DGA Awards, the winner there has gone onto win Best Director except for eight occasions; the latest time was the 2019 awards season, when Sam Mendes received the DGA award for "1917" only for Bong Joon-Ho to win Best Director for "Parasite" at the 92nd Academy Awards.

If Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim aren't able to compete for the DGA Award, that takes away a possible momentum-building opportunity in their Oscar campaign. No documentary has even been nominated for, much less won, Best Director — or Best Picture, for that matter. Those categories have historically been the domain of narrative fiction films, and it appears that even a barnstormer like "You Can See Everything" will have to overcome even higher odds to break the Best Director streak. (Best Picture, however, seems to still be in play.) 

The acting categories remain a question mark. Again, "You Can See Everything" explicitly features Amanda Seyfried acting as Elizabeth Holmes in fictionalized scenes. But the Academy has a conservative track record on acknowledging category-pushing acting. For instance, at the 76th Academy Awards, when "Lord of the Rings: Return of the King" otherwise swept, there was one noted snub: Andy Serkis had campaigned for Best Supporting Actor for his part as Gollum, but the Academy was unwilling to recognize (or even nominate) a motion-capture animated performance. Like Serkis as Gollum, Seyfried in "You Can See Everything" is brilliant, Oscar or not.

"You Can See Everything" is playing in theaters.