The nominations for best documentary at the Oscars and Baftas are in! Awards season can be a frustrating time for us doc makers: a nomination can send a film into the rarefied club of nonfiction titles that reach a wider audience (in 2016, 108 documentaries were released in UK cinemas, but nearly all at a limited number of sites), so we want to see the films we most admire make the list. But Oscar and Bafta nominees are chosen by the organisations’ members, a pool of voters mainly interested in fiction features. This usually makes for unadventurous lists; rarely do they point you towards the best, most innovative nonfiction films of the year.

This year’s Oscars shows some progress. It’s right that Strong Island made the list. Directed by a black, transgender director (Yance Ford), it tells the story of his brother’s murder and unpicks issues of racial discrimination with a passionate fury. The Bafta shortlist includes Raoul Peck’s I Am Not Your Negro (nominated for last year’s Oscars), a grenade thrown into liberal conversations about race that adapts a James Baldwin manuscript and daringly retains his non-linear style of thought. But these films are exceptions. Across both awards, many voters, and some critics, still appear to regard documentaries as information exchange devices rather than actual films. Instead of selecting movies that are visual or emotional triumphs, priority is given to “single idea” documentaries about well-known people or issues or simply those with the biggest marketing spend.

An Inconvenient Sequel is on the Bafta list arguably because voters have heard of Al Gore, saw the first film and know that climate change is important. But it’s as conventional in form as documentaries come, with an all-knowing narrator who allows for no doubt or ambiguity in his positive worldview. Sports doping documentary Icarus, which appears on both lists, has achieved a higher profile since its initial release after the Russian Winter Olympic team was banned. But its great scoop comes by accident halfway through, making for an unbalanced film.

Of 2017’s highlights, Fred Wiseman’s remarkable Ex Libris didn’t make either list. Three fly-on-the-wall hours inside New York’s public library system, its long observational scenes make it one of the bravest films of the year. (In the case of the Baftas, a documentary needs to have had a UK cinema release to be considered, meaning Ex Libris was not eligible.)

Unexpectedly, director Agnes Varda and muralist JR’s delightful Faces Places made the Oscars list. A joyous and mischievous whirlwind, it’s about making “ordinary” faces famous for a day by pasting giant posters of them on remote rural buildings in France. But it’s not on Bafta’s list, which has a diversity problem. Four nominations for male directors and one for a female co-director(for a film about a man) is not an accurate representation of the year in docs. There’s no room, for example, for Carol Salter’s brilliantly deadpan Chinese funeral film Almost Heaven, nor three more formally experimental documentaries: Casting JonBenet, a postmodern hybrid about the nature of truth; All This Panic, an uncomfortably intimate and ambiguous tale told over several years about being a teenager; and Jen Brea’s Unrest, an issue-led film about defying medical and media scepticism that works both as home movie and investigative documentary.

So who will win? Bafta has nominated a genuine original in City of Ghosts, Matt Heineman’s love letter to citizen journalism in Syria. Unflinching in investigating masculinity, sadness and violence, it’s a difficult film that offers no answers. It would be a well-deserved winner. And I would love to see Faces Places win the Oscar. In 2017 the documentary form was pushed forward and, in nominating Faces Places and Strong Island, the Oscar list has at least partially acknowledged that.

Charlie Phillips is the Guardian’s head of documentaries