In case you hadn't noticed, the Oscars don't do politics. The crisis point of every Academy Awards broadcast is that moment when an Oscar recipient strays from the typically fawning, self-celebrating script, blurts out a vaguely interesting political affiliation and triggers an audibly huge intake of terrified air from the assembled throng - followed by queasy reaction shots of Jack Nicholson and Johnny Depp.

This year, in a race defined by safe entertainment bets such as Atonement and Juno, the Best Documentary category promises to be a political headache for the jamboree's organisers. Three nominees out of the five are War on Terror-related documentaries, and their presence alone threatens to bring a mood-killing reality check to the Kodak Theatre.

No End in Sight, Taxi to the Darkside and Operation Homecoming are impassioned examinations of the human cost of the War on Terror, and yet what's intriguing about them is their complete isolation in the movie market.

Increasingly, the commercial failure of mainstream Iraq war movies such as Lions for Lambs and In the Valley of Elah has justified an evacuation of overt political content from Hollywood products. While news media outlets such as Fox News are seen as partisan. Thus the documentary-makers have become the underfunded and underexposed keepers of anything approaching objective truth and political insight. Mostly self-financed and long-suffering, they go to the war zones that we've created, they find the stories that we've neglected and they speak to the people that we've ignored. In short, they make films that matter. So if, and when, they pick up that statuette on Sunday night, and they don't tearfully thank their agents, their high-school teachers and their dead relatives, there's probably a good reason.