The conventional wisdom about documentaries is that the greatest ones are as compelling as the best fictional films. Rarely has this been more true than with Hoop Dreams, the epic-length basketball documentary that shook things up in the movie world in 1994 and 1995.

Fans already know its pedigree. It was conceived as a 30-minute PBS piece about inner-city kids pursuing their dreams of basketball stardom, but the filmmakers -- director Steve James and producers Peter Gilbert and Frederick Marx -- wound up following their two young subjects for five years, all the way through high school and into college. Two lower-class Chicago boys, William Gates and Arthur Agee, wanted nothing more than to reach the NBA, and Hoop Dreams takes us on a tumultuous ride through victories, defeats, injuries, missed opportunities, personal tragedies, and surprising twists of fate.

The boys' families become part of the story, as do their slummy neighborhoods and their societal positions. Arthur and William's basketball careers take separate paths -- one is on scholarship at the Catholic school Isiah Thomas attended; the other is stuck at a public school -- and the film keeps up with both of them. Yet it also brings in thought-provoking subplots about the welfare system, college recruitment tactics, emphasis on sports over academics, the racial divide, and a host of other always-current topics. Amazingly, it does this without the filmmakers ever preaching a certain point of view. They simply let us watch the stories unfold.

Hoop Dreams premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1994 and won the audience award for best documentary despite being almost three hours long. As a regular Sundance attendee, I can tell you how noteworthy this is. Most festival titles are closer to 90 minutes in length, and by the end of the fest, you're so exhausted you start choosing screenings based on how short the movies are. A 171-minute movie being declared the audience favorite is stunning.

By the time it was released theatrically on Oct. 14, 1994 (14 years ago this week), Hoop Dreams had already won rave reviews from critics, including Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert, who praised it repeatedly on their At the Movies program and named it the best movie of 1994. (Ebert would later declare it the best movie of the entire decade.) It was the best-reviewed film of the year, appearing on more critics' Top 10 lists than any other movie, including heavyweights like Pulp Fiction and Forrest Gump. (Clips of Siskel and Ebert are on the DVD, along with a wealth of other behind-the-scenes footage and commentary.)

It succeeded at the box office, too, grossing $7.8 million -- a paltry sum by blockbuster standards, but enough to make it the highest-grossing documentary (not counting concert films) in history. It has since fallen to No. 10 on the list, but its legacy remains. All sports documentaries are compared to it, and even narrative sports films are held up to more scrutiny because of it. Look at something like The Rookie or Miracle or Remember the Titans: Are any of these as enthralling, enriching, or entertaining as Hoop Dreams?

So the film was a success in every way, and then came the shocker:

It was not nominated for an Academy Award for best documentary.

More fodder for the conspiracy theorists: The film that wound up winning the Oscar for best documentary was made by Freida Lee Mock ... who had been the head of the Academy's documentary committee the two previous years. Could there be any doubt that her former pals and colleagues were naturally inclined to favor her work?

The outcry over the snubbing of Hoop Dreams was so great that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences -- a group that changes its rules about as often as England changes monarchs -- actually revised the procedure for nominating documentaries. It seems Hoop Dreams was the last straw after a decade of the Academy failing to be impressed by films that everyone else on earth thought were extraordinary.

An article in Entertainment Weekly pointed out that most of the members of the Academy's documentary committee weren't documentarians themselves, putting that branch in stark contrast with the other groups that choose the specialized Oscars. Film editors choose the Best Film Editing nominees, and makeup artists choose the Best Makeup nominees, yet the people choosing the Best Documentary nominees were just regular ol' volunteers. Some of them weren't even members of the Academy.

Furthermore, in this particular instance, some committee members were actively campaigning against Hoop Dreams, and they succeeded in convincing other members to lower their grades in the Academy's convoluted scoring system. The committee seemed to believe that since Hoop Dreams had been successful critically and financially, it didn't need the extra attention that an Oscar would give it. They felt it was better to use the Academy Awards to give lesser-known films a boost.

The Academy's new rules revised the scoring process. The Academy also formed a New York branch of the committee to help the Los Angeles-based group screen the eligible films. A year later, the stipulation was added that documentaries must screen theatrically for at least a week, thus reducing the number of eligible films and making it easier to sort through the best ones.

The rules have continued to be refined over the last 13 years, though the documentary category is still the source of much controversy and frustration. Just this year, documentarian A.J. Schnack was so irritated by yet another series of Academy snubs for documentaries (not his own) that he and a small group created a new documentary award in protest.

It's always a little embarrassing when a ruckus is caused by a film that's not very good anyway. That's not the case with Hoop Dreams, which is strong enough to withstand the scrutiny that comes with being a rallying cry. Not only did it help the Academy examine its policies, but it also inspired the creation of the Hoop Dreams Scholarship Fund, which has helped hundreds of inner-city kids in the Washington D.C. area go to college. How many movies can claim that?

FROM THE TIME CAPSULE: When Hoop Dreams was released 14 years ago this week, on Oct. 14, 1994...

• Pulp Fiction and Wes Craven's New Nightmare opened the same day, with the former taking the top spot at the box office. Forrest Gump, in its 15th week of release, was still plugging away. The Specialist, The River Wild, and Timecop were doing well, too. Stargate, The Santa Clause, and Dumb and Dumber were all waiting in the wings, to be released before the year's end.

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Eric's Time Capsule appears every Monday at Film.com. You can visit Eric at his website, where his dreams seldom involve hoops.