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The 2022 Oscar Shorts – Get to Know All 15 Nominees

By Rowan Sullivan & Sebastian Torrelio

Watching the 2022 Oscar shorts is the quickest and easiest way to get closer to watching all of the Oscar contenders. The short films also typically contain a more diverse selection of films than the feature nominees. This year’s nominees come from four continents and range from a creepy Chilean animation to a documentary set in Afghanistan. So if you’re looking for something to say at the Academy Awards on the 27th, check these short films out at cinemas near you.

The Animated 2022 Oscar Shorts

Affairs of the Art (U.K./Canada)

In over three decades since the conception of Beryl, the leading lady of Quinn’s exasperating comic piece Affairs of the Art, the pace and nature of animation, feminism, and sexually-driven dramaticism have all shifted drastically. Quinn’s nominated short is another document of Beryl’s mental misadventures, an abstract cartoon of imaginative family constructs that threaten to break any semblance of sane reality with every passing narration.

Quinn’s latest relies on its draftsmanship, a force beyond reckoning that compiles some of the most interesting shots of characterization among any ensemble cast in this year’s Oscar nominee pool, feature-length or otherwise. It’s a shame that Affairs is so bogged down by its frenetic involvement in personal mind-wandering that any sort of meaningful plot elements remain impossible to grasp through 16 minutes of running time. It is best to marvel and/or gawk at the restless spirit of Beryl’s peers than to make any grander sense of the screwball antics at show. -ST

Bestia (Chile)

Even with context, the Chilean Bestia is a difficult piece to wrangle into short summary. An allegory for militant upheavel caused during the country’s multi-decade era of dictatorship in the 20th century, it follows the porcelain Ingrid Olderöck, an officer ingrained in systems of torture, interrogation and suggested sexual assault, as she grapples with the damage that a nation’s collective political anguish has caused to her own mental state.

Bestia boasts an extremely delicate take on modern psychological horror, the composition and editing of Ingrid’s memory-driven story treated with a very fine balance between shock, abstraction, and historical signifiers. Covarrubias’ short, the most immediately praise-worthy of this year’s animated showcase, dives incredibly deep into a realm of traumatic pain at the cost of its audience’s understanding of the haunting historical subtext at hand, and still manages to come out all the better for the risks at hand. -ST

Boxballet (Russia)

Striking most for its character design, Dyakov’s BoxBallet is a premise of opposites-attracting in the most bluntly conventional manner – a large, brutish-looking boxer, face plump with bruises and broken features, develops a meaningful crush on a local ballet dancer, fragile and swanlike in every respect, as if ripped from a fairy tale book herself so paper-thin in stature. Together, they form a bond of complementary artforms in a world of machismo expectations.

There is something not all too unfamiliar about Dyakov’s short, exploring the nature of public imagery and introspective self-shaming in a form that some Pixar-esque western animation studios have done more progressively (or, anthropomorphically) in the last decade. BoxBallet is, for what can be taken at face value, the most broadly conventional of this year’s animated lineup – which is not to say that, the politics of its host nation aside, it should not lose points for the simplicity of a pleasant, embraceable artstyle and common message to morality. -ST

Robin Robin (U.K.)

A most obviously cute response to the fish-out-of-water tale, Robin Robin is a bird-out-of-sky charmer by the stop-motion institution Aardman Animations: a quaint Christmas anecdote of a young bird mistakenly raised among a family of mice, who shares their common habits of food-stealing and house-sneaking. Through discovery and predatory villainy, namely the softly sinister tabby cat voiced spectacularly by Gillian Anderson, Robin learns about self-identity while also confronting his place in a hostile, though emotionally-accepting environment.

The clever coerciveness of Robin Robin lies primarily in its artstyle, a step beyond even what Aardman has mastered with their claymation features. As if specifically targeted for a newer, younger generation, the stock characters are fully-feltlike creations, pulled directly from a young child’s playpen as if safe for a baby to teethe on. Everything about this particular world is crafted out of durability and softness, two perfect qualities to shape a holiday short out of, anticipating the seasonal return rate this piece will surely receive the studio for years to come, Oscar-win or otherwise. -ST

The Windshield Wiper (Spain)

A rotoscoped anthology of the musings that come with smoking endlessly in a noisy cafe, The Windshield Wiper attempts to dissect the idea of love through several seemingly unrelated vignettes, an extended and existential interpretation of love in the age of technology that silently asks questions about the relationships we fail to attain within an unforgiving society that aggrandizes the disconnected, however hollow-eyed and arrogantly elevated their lifestyle might be.

It’s genuinely difficult to decipher what Alberto Mielgo is going for here – by diving headfirst into the elder tradition of hyperlink storytelling, he’s created a more-than-interesting collage of socio-economic thoughts to ponder. Not unlike a college student’s Tumblr page, however, the cohesiveness of the tech-era message behind The Windshield Wiper takes a backseat to the visual reliance of computer-generated vibes. Any Oscar showcase is welcome to include such a brief level of fantastical randomness among its more traditional fare, but without a clearer direction its hard to see this piece ever penetrating the most frontal layer of any voting body’s minds. -ST

The Documentary 2022 Oscar Shorts

Audible (U.S.)

Audible follows high school athlete Amaree McKenstry and his close friends at Maryland School for the Deaf as they come to the end of their senior year. He’s preparing for the final few football matches whilst they’re all dealing with the trauma of losing a close friend and preparing for life after school.

Audible is told almost entirely from the perspective of Amaree and his fellow students, and therefore almost entirely in sign language (bar a few appearances from hearing people). The heartfelt one-on-one interviews make it an intimate window into the experience of deaf kids on the cusp of adulthood. There are also plenty of well-shot sequences, particularly those of the high school football matches. However, the short tries to cover too much, from dealing with grief to repairing father-son relationships, which means it doesn’t really touch on any one issue very deeply. As a result the film feels more like a quick snapshot of life as a deaf student instead of offering something deeper. -RS

Lead Me Home (U.S.)

500,000 Americans experience homelessness every night. Lead Me Home captures the experience from a range of perspectives; from real-life stories of those experiencing homelessness across three cities on the West Coast (Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle) as well as clips of the unsympathetic.

Lead Me Home does a good job of personalizing the experience of homelessness and humanizing those marginalized because of it. However, it fails to explore the wider issue. Instead of looking at the causes or possible solutions, it just presents the issue as if the audience wasn’t already aware of it. Perhaps the filmmakers didn’t want to politicize the issue by refusing to point a finger anywhere. However in refusing to point a finger, the filmmakers present homelessness as something that exists naturally in all societies rather than an issue that could possibly be solved. -RS

The Queen of Basketball (U.S.)

As an Olympics Gold Medalist, that won 3 national trophies at a collegiate level before being drafted to the NBA, you might think that Luisa Harris would be a household name. However, unfortunately she’s not.

Ben Proudfoot’s The Queen of Basketball does her accomplishments justice. Just like his short from last year, A Concerto is a Conversation, The Queen of Basketball feels incredibly warm thanks to the close one-on-one interviews with Luisa and her infectious laughing. It also has a similar celebratory tone – not just recapping Luisa’s incredible athletic accomplishments but also celebrating her happiness in her humble family life. Ultimately, there’s nothing to fault with this film. It’s well shot, features a beautifully warm subject in Luisa, and is brought together well with the editing to make it feel neither too long nor too fits the running time perfectly. -RS

Three Songs for Benazir (Afghanistan)

Three Songs for Benazir is the only Documentary short contender produced outside the U.S. It documents the story of Shaista, a newly married man living in a displacement camp in Kabul. He struggles to balance his dreams of being the first from his tribe to join the Afghan National Army with his family responsibilities and illiteracy.

Three Songs for Benazir feels like the most ‘real’ documentary of the nominees. It doesn’t feature any one-on-one interviews or direct talking to the camera and there is no interference from the director. Instead, it follows Shaista observationally, catching what feel like more everyday moments in his life living in and around the displacement camp. We follow him as he watches planes in the sky, tries to sign up for the army, and sing a lot (both to himself and others). Whilst it only gives a small glimpse into his life with Benazir, it all feels ‘real’ and authentic, and not shown for show. -RS

When We Were Bullies (U.S.)

After bumping into an old elementary school classmate in his 60s, filmmaker Jay Rosenblatt is compelled to track down his fifth grade class and teacher to examine their memory of and complicity in a bullying incident 50 years ago.

When We Were Bullies is a very self-indulgent short film. In short, the filmmaker decides to make a film to relieve himself of the guilt he still feels from bullying a classmate 50 years ago. He never considers how the film might make his victim (and all other victims of bullying) feel, going so far as to call this out directly in the voiceover (“I didn’t consider how the film will make you feel”). Worse, he doesn’t even care, as covered when he says “The film isn’t really about you, it was about us (the bullies).” It reminded me a bit of ‘white fragility’ in the way the filmmaker centralizes his own guilt, over the actual victims suffering. As a result, it just feels incredibly narrow-sighted, self-centered, and oblivious to what really would be a ‘progressive’ way of examining his guilt today. Plus the animations of his elementary class’ photos are too repetitive. Take his elementary school teacher’s advice and consider avoiding this film. – RS

The Live Action 2022 Oscar Shorts

Ala Kachuu – Take and Run (Switzerland)

19 year old Sezim moves to the Kyrgyz capital to continue her studies when she’s kidnapped by a group of young men and taken into the barren countryside. There, she’s forced to marry a stranger. If she refuses the marriage, she is threatened with social stigmatization and exclusion. Torn between her desire for freedom and the constraints of Kyrgyz culture, Sezim desperately seeks a way out.

Ala Kachuu is your typical foreign language entry into the Academy Awards shorts competition. Its purpose is to show that something bad happens every day somewhere in the world that you never knew of. In this case, most viewers probably haven’t heard of Kyrgyzstan, or its fiercely patriarchal society, but on seeing it, you’ll probably become pretty angry about a culture you knew next to nothing about. Luckily, this one isn’t 100% misery porn, as the lead never loses hope of changing her life. It also captures the city and countryside well and builds tension effectively as Sezim plots her escape. – RS

On My Mind (Denmark)

One morning, gloomy Henrik enters a bar and spots a karaoke machine. He has to sing a song to his wife and it has to be right now.

On My Mind is a heavily sentimental film with a twist that is pretty obvious from the start. The grumpy bar-owner kick-starts a pantomime situation, by refusing to let Henrik sing. There’s a bit of ‘will he-won’t he’ before Henrik finally reveals the emotional burden he’s obviously carrying. The reveal feels manipulative, because we’re expecting it and it’s being held back from us deliberately to provoke emotion. So when it lands, it’s sad, but equally frustrating, hindering the intended payoff. – RS

Please Hold (U.S.)

In an America that has become fully automated, Mateo, a young Latino man is arrested by a police drone without explanation. He’s locked up in a detention center fully manned by bots and the familiar call center AI we’ve all had trouble with. To get out, he has to navigate the computerized bureaucracy of the privatized American justice system, in search of an actual human being to set things right.

If you’ve ever been caught in the bureaucracy of the state, you’ll be able to sympathize with Mateo’s misfortune. Like Black Mirror, Please Hold taps into the collective unease of the modern world by looking at the intended and unintended consequences of new technologies – in this case a fully automated society and growing police state. However, it does it with a little more humor, and without a complete lack of hope, making it a more easy-going watch. Plus it has a satirized version of Microsoft’s annoying paperclip helper. Please Hold manages to lightly criticize the carceral system without feeling completely tone-deaf like last year’s Two Distant Strangers. -RS

The Dress (Poland)

Julia toils away at a rundown motel in rural Poland as a maid. In the monotony of life, she starts fantasizing about a truck driver that occasionally visits and the possibility of ending her loneliness.

The Dress may just be the most depressing short of the Live-Action section. As whilst the protagonists of Ala Kachuu and On My Mind have hope or achieve some form of closure, Julia is stuck in an endless limbo of work and prejudice. Just when you think life might be looking up for her as she comes out of her shell, her hopes are completely shot, bringing her self-esteem crashing down. I’m hoping the Academy picked this short because of the lead performance and well-constructed dreary aesthetic and not for the misery porn factor common in a lot of the Academy Award nominees. -RS

The Long Goodbye (U.K.)

Riz and his family are in the middle of preparing a wedding celebration when a white supremacist group arrives in their neighborhood.

This short was released back in 2020 alongside Riz Ahmed’s ‘The Long Goodbye’ hip hop album. Like the music, the short goes hard on post-Brexit Britain and the rise of the far-right movements. It’s quick, and builds intimacy, and later chaos, through rapid cutting, fast-paced dialogue, and movement. It’s designed to feel authentic and it succeeds in selling it to an audience perhaps familiar with British white supremacist hate groups from films such as This is England, the Small Axe series, or Blinded by the Light. It concludes powerfully with spoken word to make this year’s most powerful protest entry. -RS

Softie (Kenya) Pan African Film Festival 2021

Boniface “Softie” Mwangi was drawn to political activism during his time photographing the post election violence in 2007. Now, he’s running for office in a regional Kenyan election. To succeed, he has to radically change a democracy tainted by corruption, violence, and mistrust. This documentary follows his journey as he campaigns to reform Kenyan politics whilst struggling to hold his family together.

Unlike other political documentaries like Knock Down the House and The Great Hack where Western viewers might have a bit of familiarity with the focus (the Democratic “Blue Wave” of the 2018 House elections and the Cambridge Analytica controversy respectively), Softie’s story is unknown. Western media rarely covers the political protests and uprisings in Africa – especially sub-Saharan Africa where pro-U.S. dictators reside. Therefore, Softie has to do a bit more than these other films to get you up to speed with Kenyan politics. Luckily Boniface’s life is a kind of awakening to the national political situation, so this is covered within his story – his life as a photographer led him to political activism, and his political activism led him to run in the elections. The filmmakers concisely fill in the gaps – British colonialism creating a nation governed by tribalism – to flesh out a more complete picture.

The majority of Softie takes place during his campaign for office. It documents a lot of the day to day tasks of campaigning much like Kazuhiro Soda’s Campaign – from handing out flyers and greeting locals to securing funds to keep it going. However it’s not quite as focused on just the campaign, as we also follow Boniface’s wife (Njeri) and children on a personal level as they bounce between Kenya and the U.S. to escape death threats. It feels like we have almost unrestricted access to both Boniface and Njeri’s personal lives. Boniface first tells Njeri of his goal to run for office on camera (her reaction gives that away) and we’re often closer to Njeri and their children in the U.S. than Boniface is in Kenya making it feel like we know their emotions better than their other halves. It almost feels like we’re the relationship mediator between them at times. This personal, emotional layer emphasizes the challenges of trying to build a family whilst focused on your career, allowing us to empathize with them much more.

The other negative plus that Softie has on the U.S. political documentaries is that the political situation in Kenya is more immediately dangerous than those in Knock Down the House and The Great Hack. Boniface’s life always feels in danger of being extinguished by his political rivals, as journalists and people linked to the voting systems are murdered whilst his story is told. The higher stakes make this film more urgent and tense. It sometimes feels like we’re watching a hagiography of someone that will be martyred.

If you’re looking for an observational documentary that follows a political activist trying to change a corrupt system by running for government and the effects this has on their family, Softie is the film for you.

Check back to our Pan African Film Festival 2021 page for more reviews coming out of the 29th edition of the festival.

Nollywood in Hollywood – Celebrating New Nigerian Film in Los Angeles

Last weekend, the 5th edition of the Nollywood in Hollywood film festival returned to Los Angeles for another brief showcase of the best Nigerian films from the past year. This year, the festival ran for two nights, screening Gone at the USC School of Cinematic Arts on Friday, before heading over to the West Side for Juju Stories at The Aero. Whilst we were only able to attend Saturday’s screening, we encourage all film fans to look out for Nollywood in Hollywood next year. Not only are the screening’s a brilliant showcase of new Nollywood films in a city that often overlooks the African film industries, but these screenings are free and very well hosted.

In many years of attending film festivals, Nollywood in Hollywood’s screening of Juju Stories was only the second which actually provided regional food to the entire audience ahead of the film. The other was a screening of Mohamed Al Daradji’s The Journey for the BFI Fest for which the Iraqi Embassy supplied Baklava to everyone attending. Whilst free food isn’t necessary to enjoy movies, it does add a memorable touch that will probably make you more open to whatever film you are about to see. From what we saw, the free meat pies, spring rolls, and puff puff excited a few attendants familiar with the foods, and made others more open to socializing to discover what the food was and to learn more about the event in the cinema lobby ahead of the film. It’s a great way to get an unfamiliar audience open to experiencing unfamiliar films.

Whilst ‘Nollywood’ has come to stand for all film production from Nigeria, Nollywood boomed in the late 1980’s/early 1990s with the arrival of the VHS system. VHS made filmmaking cheaper and therefore more accessible, allowing anyone (filmmaker or not) to have a go at making their own films. It also made it easier to distribute films, as VHS opened the home video market, meaning filmmakers didn’t have to have to make deals with theaters to get their films seen. Because VHS made it easier and cheaper to shoot films and get them seen, filmmaking in Nigeria exploded. At certain points in the 2000’s the Nollywood film industry was making an estimated 4 films a day! However, alongside the boom in production, the new face of Nigerian cinema faced a lot of criticism. Opening up the film industry to everyone loosened the standards of filmmaking as well as the themes. Many of the new Nollywood productions focused on witchcraft and juju, giving viewers a skewed view of Nigerian (and African) culture.

Juju Stories is an example of the current state of Nollywood film. As the focus of Nigerian film production has switched back to theatrical releases supported by larger budgets, the production standards have improved. Many Nollywood productions are now screened in cinemas at home or abroad, as well as reaching international film festivals and streaming platforms. Whilst the themes made popular in the Nollywood home-video era remain (such as witchcraft), the films look a lot better. Juju Stories is a great example of this. It includes three different stories shot by three different filmmakers from a Nigerian film collective that all touch on Juju. Each short is very well made, and the comedy fit the big screen environment perfectly. It reminded me of a screening of Argentina’s Wild Tales that I saw a while back in which one man, probably Argentinian, was cracking up throughout the film. Similarly, the audience at the Juju Stories screening was cracking up and shouting out at the characters on screen.

Unlike the Nollywood movies of the home-video era, today’s Nollywood films are at home on the big screen. So do yourself a favor and acquaint yourself with Nollywood at the Nollywood in Hollywood film festival next year to see Modern Nigerian film where it should be seen: on the big screen.

Keep an eye on the Nollywood in Hollywood website for details for next year’s festival.

Something Blue – Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival 2021

As the news channels in Panama look forward to a big celebrity wedding featuring popular TV star Lucia de la Fuente, Ana gets ready for her own wedding taking place in 8 days time. However, an unexpected chain of events sees her racing around Panama City trying to get married as soon as possible. Something Blue is a rare festival rom-com that anyone can enjoy if they know what they’re in for.

If you’re into Eugenio Derbez rom-coms (see Overboard) then Something Blue is a film to look out for. The tone of the film is very similar, with it’s well lit production, light music, and a healthy serving of slapstick and cringe humor to propel the narrative forward. Plus Ana carries the comedy well, being the slightly overwhelming ‘bimbo’ character to laugh at throughout the film. Because of the light-hearted tone of the film, Something Blue feels more like an addition to a streaming service than a film festival film. It’s not particularly artistic or unique, things you’d typically expect from a festival film, but it plays into the cheesy rom-com genre well. So if you’re aware that it’s a cheesy rom-com before you start watching, you’ll be in a good position to enjoy it.

It’s fun to run around the city, with lots of establishing shots of the Panama City skyline and the restored old town. No doubt, these shots will help boost tourism to the city if this film is widely seen. However, Something Blue, like the majority of Latino telenovelas has a pretty un undiverse cast. Whilst only a small proportion of Panamanians define themselves as white, almost the entire cast of Something Blue is white. It’s unfortunately not unexpected, as this is pretty typical of Latino popular films and novelas, but it would have been great to see more diversity considering this is not a big TV production.

So if you’re up for a rom-com refresher to your film festival schedule, Something Blue is worth a watch.

Head to our LALIFF 2021 Hub for more reviews from the 20th edition of LALIFF.

The Fabulous Ones – Outfest Los Angeles 2023

The Fabulous Ones is a warm home-made story featuring real friends reuniting to relive their memories from 30 years ago. The drama comes from a fictionalized will of one of their old friends, but the personal, real stories provide the substance for this docufiction.

From the tone of the film, it feels like most of this film is a documentary. The characters all get along too closely for it to feel fictionalized. However, the director uses different film types to blur the past and present, and also reality and fiction. Sepia-tinted film makes some shots feel old – as if shot 30 years ago in the character’s past – and these are edited alongside clearer shots to indicate the present. Some scenes also alternate between these two types of film to make it unclear what is fictionalized and true to reality, such as the seance and re-enactment of their ‘dead’ friend. The blurring of reality and fiction and past and present through the type of film also fictionalizes their pre-transition lives. Home footage and photos of the characters pre-transition, look like the scenes of the seance, making their pasts feel less real than the present.

Whilst their pre-transition lives are made to feel like the fictionalized parts of this documentary, The Fabulous Ones doesn’t shy away from sharing the characters’ real experiences as Trans-women. Throughout their reunion, the camera focuses on each character to hear their queer coming of age experience and how their individual families and the society around them reacted. These scenes draws you closer to the characters by sharing their more intimate experiences, and in doing so, holds the film back from going full happy-dream with the fictionalized elements of the film. These moments ground the film in the unfortunate reality that not everyone is able to be who they are without prejudice.

If you’re looking for a quirky docufiction that lightly explores some heavy personal experiences through a fictionalized will left by a ‘dead’ friend, this film is for you.