The Perfect Neighbor Leads Oscar Documentary Race at 62%, But the BAFTA Winner Is Closing In

The documentary Oscar race was supposed to be over before it started. Then a schoolteacher from the Ural Mountains won a BAFTA, and traders had to rethink everything.

The Perfect Neighbor — Geeta Gandbhir's Netflix film about the killing of Ajike Owens in Ocala, Florida — entered February sitting at 75% on prediction markets, a figure that reflected both its critical consensus and its structural advantages: massive platform, Spirit Award momentum, and the kind of film that millions of people watched and couldn't stop talking about. It was, by almost every conventional metric, the frontrunner. Then February 22 arrived, and Mr. Nobody Against Putin won the BAFTA for Best Documentary. The market dropped The Perfect Neighbor to 49% overnight. It has since recovered to 62%, but the shape of that recovery — and the 27% sitting behind Mr. Nobody — tells you everything about what remains unresolved with eleven days until the March 15 ceremony.

Two films, two arguments

To understand the market, you have to understand what these films actually are, because they are making completely different cases for what a documentary Oscar should reward.

The Perfect Neighbor is constructed almost entirely from police bodycam and surveillance footage documenting a slow-motion catastrophe in a Florida subdivision. Susan Lorincz, a 58-year-old white woman, begins calling the police on the children playing in the common area near her home. The calls escalate. The parents, predominantly Black, try to de-escalate. The police, caught in the middle, do what they can. Then Lorincz fires a gun through her locked front door and kills 35-year-old Ajike Owens, a mother of four. Florida prosecutors are left wrestling with Stand Your Ground. Gandbhir doesn't narrate or editorialize — she lets the footage build, incident by incident, until the ticking-time-bomb quality of the whole situation becomes unbearable. Critics called it "nearly flawless in its pacing." Foreign Policy called it "a slow-motion horror film." It is the kind of documentary that people watch on a Tuesday night on Netflix, feel sick, and immediately text someone about.

Mr. Nobody Against Putin is something else entirely. Pavel Talankin was a fun-loving events coordinator and videographer at a primary school in Karabash, a heavily polluted town in the Chelyabinsk region of Russia — the same school he attended as a child. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, his job changed. The government required schools to hold regular "patriotic displays" and upload footage to a state portal to prove compliance, which gave Talankin an unusual form of cover: he was already supposed to be filming. Over two years, he secretly documented the militarization of his school — the parades, the propaganda lessons, the moment when students' family members began being recruited to fight. He fled Russia in 2024, shared the footage with Copenhagen-based American filmmaker David Borenstein, and the result premiered at Sundance in January 2025, where it won the Special Jury Award. It holds a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes. And on February 22, it beat The Perfect Neighbor at the BAFTAs.

Why the BAFTA hit so hard

The BAFTA Documentary win wasn't just a precursor result — it was a signal about what kind of voter is energized this cycle. The Academy's European bloc tends to vote in alignment with BAFTA, and a film about Russian school propaganda, shot undercover, smuggled out on encrypted platforms, made by a man who had to flee his own country to release it — that film is doing something beyond filmmaking craft. It is a document of historical record at a moment when the question of what's happening inside Russia feels urgent in a way that is difficult to overstate. Even sympathetic critics have acknowledged that much of the film's acclaim has less to do with its artistic merits and more to do with its subject matter hitting a raw nerve. Whether that helps or hurts with Academy voters is precisely the question the market is pricing.

There is also a credible counter-argument embedded in the film itself. Mr. Nobody Against Putin has provoked sharply divided reactions since Sundance — inspiring some viewers while infuriating others. Critics on the more skeptical end have noted that Talankin's monologues feel scripted, that the musical score intrudes more than it enhances, and that the nomination came at the expense of 2000 Meters to Andriivka — a film many considered more deserving. None of that bothered BAFTA voters, but Academy voters are a different, broader electorate.

The Spirit Award counterweight

The reason The Perfect Neighbor recovered from 49% rather than continuing to slide is the Independent Spirit Award, which it won on February 15 — one week before the BAFTA. The Spirits are the most reliable precursor in documentary specifically: the overlap between Spirit voters and the Academy's documentary branch is substantial, and six of the past ten years' Oscar documentary winners had already won the Spirit Award. The Perfect Neighbor is also the only nominee in this race streaming on Netflix at scale, which matters in a category where Academy voters actually have to watch the films to vote. Mr. Nobody is available on the Kino Film Collection, a platform that has a fraction of Netflix's reach.

Gandbhir's dual nominations — The Perfect Neighbor for Feature and The Devil Is Busy for Documentary Short — have also concentrated industry attention on her in a way that is structurally unusual. She is not just a contender; she is the story of this particular category, the filmmaker whose work is being discussed at length across trade publications in a way that tends to translate into votes.

The rest of the field

The Alabama Solution, Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman's HBO film about the prison system in Alabama, sits at roughly 8% — squeezed from both sides, unable to claim the BAFTA tailwind of Mr. Nobody or the Spirit Award and platform advantage of The Perfect Neighbor. It received a PGA nomination alongside both frontrunners , which keeps it technically alive, but the market has largely moved on. Come See Me in the Good Light, Ryan White's Apple TV+ film featuring Tig Notaro, and *Cutting