It’s way too easy to feel jaded about Oscar season. The forced pomp, the moneyed campaigns, the boggling repetition of dozens of awards fetes could jaundice any eye. But it’s tougher to be cynical about the documentary category, where an Oscar nomination, let alone a win, can have mighty ripple effects.

Kirby Dick’s Oscar-nominated “The Invisible War” (2012), about sexual assault in the military, led to a House hearing on the matter. After the release of Louie Psihoyos’s Oscar winner, “The Cove” (2009), about the slaughter of dolphins in Japan, the number of dolphins and porpoises killed there fell by 17,000 a year. And “An Inconvenient Truth,” the 2006 film starring Al Gore that won two Oscars, thrust global warming into the public conversation — and look how well we heeded him! (Insert sad emoticon here.)

All of which, for the Bagger, raises a question: What onus, if any, falls on the Academy to spotlight documentaries that might bring about a measure of justice? Should substance trump style, or is it folly to assume they’re mutually exclusive?

For years, the Academy’s documentary choices had been denounced for what the critic Owen Gleiberman described as a “self-defeating aesthetic of granola documentary correctness.” In 2009, he lamented that the shortlist — which is culled from all eligible entrants, and from which the final five nominations are drawn — not only excluded some of that year’s most entertaining nonfiction offerings but also came off like a “program for the Mother Teresa Film Festival.” In other words, too much spinach.

But is there a chance that things have since swung too far the other way? In 2012, the Academy changed its rules and began requiring that only documentaries that had been reviewed in The Los Angeles Times or The New York Times would be eligible for Oscar nominations, a decision that kept more obscure films out of the race. And in 2013, the documentary race was broadened to allow every member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences — not just those in the documentary branch — to vote for the final winner. Michael Lumpkin, director of the American Film Institute’s documentary festival, said the shifts underscored the more prominent role that documentaries play in our culture’s media consumption. Michael Moore, who led the move for the changes, says they also democratized the process.

The new rules also might have affected what makes the shortlist and what, in the end, wins.

Thom Powers, artistic director of the Doc NYC film festival (he wears hats for several other prominent festivals, too) is not an Academy member but has, he said, “spent a long time in the weeds following these things.” Since the voting change went into effect for the 2013 awards, he said, he’s seen a noticeable shift on the shortlists away from documentaries that are barely known.

“All are films that distinguished themselves at film fests or theatrically or had critical acclaim,” Mr. Powers said of the more recent selections. That includes the somewhat surprising semifinalists for the 2016 awards, like Laurie Anderson’s free-form film essay about loss, “Heart of a Dog,” and “We Come as Friends,” about the exploitation of South Sudan. (The list of 15 was announced Dec. 1, and the nominees will be revealed on Jan. 14.) While Ms. Anderson told the Bagger she was surprised that her film had been included — even her French producers told her, “We don’t think Americans will like it” — it was a critical darling. And while “We Come as Friends” hasn’t generated a ton of discussion, it won prizes at the Sundance and Berlin film festivals.

Still, the Academy is known to favor show business movies and, lo, two of the last three winners of the documentary prize, along with one of this year’s front-runners, “Amy,” the story of Amy Winehouse, are about just that.

In 2013, when the nominated documentaries delved into subjects like AIDS and conflict in the Middle East, the prize went to “Searching for Sugar Man,” about a tremendously gifted, woefully obscure musician from Detroit. For the 2014 awards, when the nominees included Joshua Oppenheimer’s artful, devastating “The Act of Killing,” about death squads in Indonesia, along with films about the Egyptian uprising and deadly covert American military operations, the Oscar went to “20 Feet From Stardom,” about backup singers who were largely forgotten despite having been instrumental (as it were) in making hits.

“The knock against the system is people think it favors films that are more about show business,” Mr. Powers said. “Well, of course it does. The Association of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is an organization of show business people. Why shouldn’t it?”

Paradoxically, the documentary branch’s self-consciousness about that perception might have hurt one of the projected shoo-ins last year. “Life Itself” had all the winning ingredients: a movie about a beloved film-world figure, the critic Roger Ebert, directed by Steve James, maker of “Hoop Dreams” and “The Interrupters,” both of which failed to receive nominations, to much chagrin.

Yet “Life Itself” failed to make it off the shortlist. Why? One theory holds that members of the documentary branch held back on voting for it because they feared it would sweep among the broader Academy membership, and the branch wanted the Oscar to go to “Citizenfour,” a zeitgeist nailer about Edward J. Snowden, directed by Laura Poitras, who is highly regarded. (It did win.)

This year, three of the 15 shortlisted films are about show-business personalities. Compare that with the shortlists from the five years before the initial rule change: Out of the 75 selected documentaries, there were just six about showbiz.

Joining “Amy” this year are “Listen to Me Marlon,” an archival exploration of the unvarnished, often anguished audio diary of Marlon Brando, and “What Happened, Miss Simone?” about the tormented musician and civil rights activist Nina Simone.

Among the non-showbiz-related favorites are Mr. Oppenheimer’s “The Look of Silence,” an intimate companion piece to his earlier work about Indonesia; “Going Clear,” Alex Gibney’s profile of Scientology; and “Cartel Land,” about vigilantes fighting Mexico’s drug wars.

“Amy” and “The Look of Silence” have been mopping up awards, raising the prospect, as the Bagger has noted, that Mr. Oppenheimer might again lose an Oscar to a songstress.

But would this be a bad thing? The Bagger put the question to Mr. Moore, whose new film, “Where to Invade Next,” is on the shortlist, and he quickly took issue with the implication that “Sugar Man” and “20 Feet From Stardom” were merely about show business.

While “20 Feet From Stardom” was essentially about African-American artists whose work had been forgotten, he said, “Sugar Man” was about a Latino man from Detroit whose deep talent didn’t help him escape either obscurity or poverty.

“As a person from Detroit, I’m glad those stories got told,” Mr. Moore said. “They’re important films.”

For his part, Mr. Moore said, he votes for the best film rather than the one that merely echoes his political beliefs. He also said that when film students ask him about making political films, he always relays the same advice.

“You’ve got to put art ahead of the politics,” he said. “The politics obviously are very important, that’s why you’re making the film. But if you make a crappy movie, nobody is going to see it, and your politics are going to get hurt by it.”

Yet even Mr. Moore admitted that such an ethos doesn’t help when it comes to choosing between equally fine but wildly different films — between, say, one about a singer poisoning herself to death before our eyes and the other about justice delayed in a far-off land.

Indeed, in a way, “Amy” makes for the tougher film. It so closely watches Ms. Winehouse destroy herself that the audience feels implicated, not simply for not looking away, but also for judging, even cackling, along the way. With that one, it’s not on Indonesia. It’s on us.