At first flicker, the Turner Classic Movies documentary "And the Oscar Goes To ..." appears to be little more than a promotional film for the Academy Awards.
It is, after all, an inside job: co-directed by Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members Jeffrey Friedman and Robert Epstein, who is also a two-time Oscar winner and an Academy governor.
And the work, which debuts Saturday at 8 p.m. EST on TCM, was produced with cooperation from its subject, the Academy itself.
But just when the film starts to be too reverential or overly celebratory, along comes a chapter about the academy's sometimes embarrassing past, followed by additional scattered criticism to offset the cheers.
While the academy and TCM were partners on the Oscar documentary, "We had final cut on the film," explained Epstein ("The Times of Harvey Milk") in a recent interview. "We wanted to tell the history as More