Despite strong reviews, "Crumb" was not nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature (the nominating committee reportedly stopped watching the film after only twenty minutes). The Oscar snub of "Crumb", and the previous year's equally acclaimed "Hoop Dreams", caused a media furor which forced the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to revamp its documentary nomination process. Zwigoff stated in an interview that: “The Academy Award thing had much more to do with the fact that at the time, a lot of the documentary membership was made up of distributors of documentary films. The rules have changed since then. But they would just vote for the films they distributed because it was in their financial interest to do so.” He continued: “I just assumed they were disgusted with the film."