• Movie Stills • Review • Sundance

Some things are worth fighting for. The preservation of the earth, for example, seems like a pretty good cause. The credit for who saves the earth, on the other hand, is a different matter. Saving our planet from annihilation should be its own reward, I'd think.

Thankfully, based on some recent conversations I had with the main players involved, that principle seems to have been shared by the producers of An Inconvenient Truth when they filed with the Academy for Oscar consideration.

Every year, we hear stories of producers going through arbitration (Brad Grey made a big play for The Departed this year; in 2006, Bob Yari was unsuccessful in his bid to be named for the Oscar for Crash) in order to decide who will get to claim the Oscar. In the documentary category, the director and one producer is allowed to "win" the Academy Award. Of the five docs nominated this year, each has two people up for the nomination. Except one. An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore's eleventh hour attempt to put the danger of global warming in sharp focus, has just director Davis Guggenheim listed.

"We decided there's two ways we can do it," says Lawrence Bender, one of the three producers of the film, along with Laurie David and Scott Burns. "Obviously, Davis is director, so he gets one slot. So we can go through arbitration and let the Academy decide who the right person should be. But what I said, and I think everyone agreed, [was] 'Look, I think we should not fight about this. This issue is so much bigger than all of us. We did not make this movie so we could get up there and get an Academy Award. We made this movie because of the issue.' We didn't want to get into a mud fight."