And nominations have been announced for the eighty-second annual Academy Awards. The antiwar comedy In the Loop received a nomination for best adapted screenplay. In the documentary category, three films featured on Democracy Now! in the past year received nods. Our former neighbors at the DCTV firehouse, Jon Alpert and Matt O’Neill were nominated in the best documentary short subject category for their film China’s Unnatural Disaster, which follows grieving parents after the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Films up for best documentary include Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country, which chronicles media activism in Burma and the extraordinary risks citizen journalists take to get information out of the country. And also nominated for best documentary is The Most Dangerous Man in America, which tells the story of Daniel Ellsberg, whose leaking of the Pentagon Papers helped end the the Vietnam War.

Daniel Ellsberg: “It was the evening of October 1st, 1969, when I first smuggled several hundred pages of top-secret documents out of my safe at the RAND Corporation. The study contained forty-seven volumes, 7,000 pages. My plan was to Xerox the study and reveal the secret history of the Vietnam War to the American people.”