The Oscars

By Rowan Sullivan & Sebastian Torrelio

If you’re short on time and still want to have something to say at next weekend’s Academy Awards, these 15 short films are a great place to start. There’s controversy, style and plenty of emotion amongst these 15 shorts and only 311 total minutes (less than most Lav Diaz films). Plus the 2021 Oscar shorts are all available to watch in cinemas near you.

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The Animated 2021 Oscar Shorts

BURROW (USA)

Burrow follows the typical format of American animated animal stories: foolhardy animal with a foolhardy human’s personality tries to overcome her own odds in pursuit of her dreams, despite whatever setbacks she may find. The little rabbit at front and center digs and digs to aimless procedure, into more of a physical hole than a metaphorical one – though inevitably, both.

What puts Sharafian’s cute fable over the top is its reliability on the audience’s relationship to the topline rabbit. Burrow is as much about anxiety and inadequacy as it is about the art of friendship, an introspective short that recalls Pixar’s dramatic ventures while sticking to what Sharafian knows best (her past work in storytelling hailing primarily from Cartoon Network’s “We Bare Bears”). Burrow is the coziest, warmest short nominated for this year’s Oscar, a 2-D feat for a studio more traditionally known for never having ventured this positively into the older medium. It has already spent the better part of its Disney+ reign inspiring viewers for the possibilities at Pixar’s hands with such work now under their belts. – ST

GENIUS LOCI (FRANCE)

In Latin, “the atmosphere of a place.” Genius Loci lands, among many places, between the night eyes of a colorscape city and the point-of-view of Reine, a girl with a chaotic mind gone untempered. Reine balances between the amplification of her own confusion and the sprawling mass of the metropolitan before her, causing her to make brash decisions. It’s only at the presence of others—her friend, her sister, the world at her feet—that she finds the easing, natural presence she needs.

There is always one Animated short contender a year that visually bends the artform to their will, with nothing short of psychedelic results. Genius Loci holds the mantle while sporting a use of color that can’t be described as anything other than conceptually modernist – a heavily fluid work that sports a boundless world, drifting between characters with a vast, underlying metaphor as a guide. If it sounds abstract and confusing, that’s because it is. But Genius Loci lands Merigeau a well-deserved nomination for a claimed seven years of translation work from page to screen, in part due to the limitless of his perception. – ST

IF ANYTHING HAPPENS I LOVE YOU (USA)

Unveiling as a story of reminiscence, If Anything Happens I Love You depicts the tragedy confronting the parents of a young girl at the most soul-crushing moment of a couple’s life conceivable, in the time following their daughter’s death at the hands of a school shooter. Bending through memories and hostile moments of plea and recreation alike, the mother and father cope with their united grief amid only the lightest strokes of color remaining in their lives.

McCormack, hot off the heels of his work on Toy Story 4, paints an extremely coarse picture of romance and love alongside Govier, the more traditional scriptwriter of the two. The most stunning physical aspects of If Anything Happens I Love You lend themselves to how rough the emotional beats of its arc are laid out – the briefest moments of color supply plentifully to an audience that is surely already overwhelmed by the density of the subject matter. But to where most American animation productions could find cheesier imagery to depict the broken emptiness of loss, If Anything Happens I Love You relies on a hand-drawn sparsity to land its devastation. If it wins the Oscar, a lot will attribute the ploying musical layer (King Princess’ “1950”), but McCormack & Govier’s short leaves a lot of testament to the empathy of its experience where most filmmakers would find an easier, more traditional route. – ST

OPERA (SOUTH KOREA/USA)

The closest work nominated under any category at this year’s Oscars comes to ‘living art,’ Opera is an abstract story of the history of modern civilization told in the perspective of, as voters will see it, a nine-minute, 2-D presentation. Cyclical in nature, Opera takes its viewer downward without narration, through the pillars of a formative society as anonymous stick figures take themselves to task, school, prayer, community involvement, and finally war.

Opera is one of the world’s most complicated pitches for an art installation, a pyramid-shaped diagram of diagram of action integrated within action, leaving the viewer to interpret the greater symbolism behind what any of it could mean – whether it be a more blunt, religious deity controlling the ides of time, or the more cryptic layers that suggest different details on caste systems, slavery and the language of political gain. Opera got its nomination through the hypnotic consistency of its animation, a full story of human trial and execution told in a bite-sized chunk. It’s the kind of artwork that could be stared at for hours on end, questioned about its integrity and morality while also serving as an introspective way of therapizing one’s own social behavior. It should not be unnoticed, however, how deeply alive the conceptual art of this showcase is, and how much imagination it takes to tell an epic tale of gods among man in such fresh, whimsical details. – ST

YES-PEOPLE (ICELAND)

In the community of an apartment building, six individuals go about their everyday lives with the most minimal degree of communication, the titular, “Yes.” Over time, their lack of language punishes them by robbing them of their sense of fraternity, leading every day into the next with a task-list, the struggle of staying alive, and the chores of inhabiting space with one another without any found value in the traditional relationship.

In a year where the primary themes of human livelihood have shaped into things that can exclusively be done on one’s own, Yes-People may have some credence in the sitcom-like amusement of watching a myriad of individuals putter and murmur around their confined rooms, acknowledging how strangely dystopian a pandemic situation has made the world’s own motivations for keeping a neighborly face. Still, Yes-People doesn’t do anything more interesting or captivating than silent European animation (a lot of English stop motion coming to mind) does with even less words. A clever conceit for some genre or set piece that would normally sustain a narrative structure, Yes-People fails to even find too much comedic presentation when translated out to US audiences, and will likely only land affirmatively to Oscar voters who look to this batch of shorts for more kooky aimlessness than emotional specificity. – ST

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The Documentary 2021 Oscar shorts

COLETTE (USA)

Ninety-year old Colette Marin-Catherine is one of the last surviving members of the French Resistance. As a young girl, she belonged to a family of Resistance fighters that included her 17-year old brother Jean-Pierre. The last time Colette saw Jean-Pierre was in 1943, when he was arrested by the Gestapo and “disappeared” into the Nazi concentration camp system, never to be seen by his family again. The family was inwardly shattered, but outwardly stoic. No tears were permitted.

It’s no surprise that this short documentary nominated for the Academy Awards is an emotional short film. It’s also no surprise that the film takes Colette from her resolute stoic, unemotional self that rejects empathy to an emotional wreck. The journey is facilitated by a young history student that takes Colette to Germany for the first time to visit the concentration camps. Whilst the young student offers a comforting inter-generational friendship, her main role is to help unlock Colette’s hidden emotions. It’s a process that feels similar to that in The Look of Silence, in which the subjects are forced to relive their War experiences for the camera. However, unlike The Look of Silence in which there’s some satisfaction in watching the perpetrators of genocide break down, capturing Colette’s long overdue tears feels intrusive and exploitative. – RS

A CONCERTO IS A CONVERSATION (USA)

A Concerto is a Conversation is perfect for the Los Angeles Academy Awards voting crowd. It tells the story of virtuoso jazz pianist and film composer Kris Bowers as he tracks his family’s lineage through his 91 year-old grandfather from Jim Crow Florida to a ‘free’ Los Angeles. The ‘City of Dreams’ is portrayed as exactly that – a city in which one black man had the opportunity to live his American dream after escaping racism in the South. His success story (establishing a successful dry-cleaning company) is completed in his grandson’s transition to high society as the film ends with him performing at Los Angeles’ iconic Walt Disney Hall.

The cinematography of the film feels overtly warm and personal. In one-on-one interviews, Kris looks directly into the camera whilst his grandfather humbly responds to him with his endearing expressions captured in close up. The warm colors of their conversation contrast with the coldness of the black and white footage from the past. There’s even a playfulness in a few shots that makes this film feel like a celebration. It feels like they’ve made it. That Kris’ present day opportunities are thanks to his Grandfather’s determination and hard work. However, their American dream also glosses over the hardships of many others. Los Angeles is presented as a safe haven where African-Americans escaping from the Jim Crow South could find refuge and success whilst racism is equated with the South. Kris and his Grandfather’s story, whilst heartwarming, feels too good to be true. – RS

DO NOT SPLIT (USA/NORWAY)

Told from within the heart of the Hong Kong protests, Do Not Split begins in 2019 as a proposed bill allowing the Chinese government to extradite criminal suspects to mainland China escalated protests throughout Hong Kong. Unfolding across a year, Do Not Split brings the footage of the Hong Kong protests first documented in films like Lessons in Dissent (2014), Lost in the Fumes (2017) and Joshua: Teenager vs. Superpower (2017) up to 2020.

In comparison to these earlier documentaries, the footage captured in this film makes the protests feel more desperate. Decked out in gas masks and gloves, the protestors have more experience and equipment than before, but so do the police. And whilst the protestors retaliation is targeted, the police violence spills over onto anyone in the vicinity, involved in the protests or not (including a young Mexican tourist). It’s interesting to see how the protests have evolved to find hints at how the protests in the U.S. may change. A pro China flash mob that hurls abuse at protestors hints at some of the more insidious government attempts to antagonize and fight the protestors. Despite the resoluteness of the protestors at the start of the short, the arrival of the pandemic allows more stringent lockdown measures signaling that the inevitable end is near. – RS

HUNGER WARD (USA)

Filmed inside two of the most active therapeutic feeding centers in conflict-ridden Yemen, Hunger Ward documents two women fighting to thwart the spread of starvation against the backdrop of a forgotten war.

Any initial hopes that this would be an uplifting against the odds story like last year’s Learning to Skateboard in a Warzone (If You’re a Girl) are quickly extinguished when we first see the kids entering this hospital ward. Their young eyes contain lives already lived and their unnaturally thin malnourished bodies evoke images of the starved concentration camp survivors from WW2. There isn’t much hope either. We witness the two brave doctors do everything they can to save a few of their patients, to no avail. The only positive, if it can be called that, is that Hunger Ward shows the critical Yemeni humanitarian crisis to a wider audience that may, with a bit of luck, have a small amount of influence in affecting the U.S. stance that sustains it. – RS

A LOVE SONG FOR LATASHA (USA)

The injustice surrounding the shooting death of 15-year-old Latasha Harlins at a South Central Los Angeles store became a flashpoint for the city’s 1992 civil uprising. As the Black community expressed its profound pain in the streets, Latasha’s friends and family privately mourned the loss of a vibrant child whose full story was never in the headlines. Nearly three decades later, director Sophia Nahli Allison’s A Love Song for Latasha removes the protests from the context of her death and rebuilds an archive of a promising life lost.

A Love Song for Latasha is by far the most original of this year’s nominated documentary shorts. It’s also the only one, bar a few moments in A Concerto is a Conversation, that isn’t captured purely mimetically. The images in this film are used to emotionally support the narrator’s voice rather than directly show what’s happening. The images depict the neighborhood Latasha grew up in what looks like Super-8 footage to make it appear a bit dated and homely, as the narrators talk through some of their favorite memories with Latasha. The most powerful moment comes when her friend tells us when she learned about Latasha’s death. The images fade to darkness as a few minimalist animated brush strokes splash across the screen in rhythm with the narrators voice crumbling with emotion. It’s the scene with the most emotion of all the documentary shorts and also the only moment which doesn’t contain any documentary footage. – RS

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The Live Action 2021 Oscar Shorts

FEELING THROUGH (USA)

Tereek (Steven Prescod) wanders alone down a New York street, seemingly aimless in his path, when he encounters a face in need. Artie (Robert Tarango), a disabled man riddled deaf and blind, is similarly out of his own way and seeks assistance getting to where he needs to be. Tereek doesn’t know such calmness, only wanting to find some safety and security in the bustling cityscape, but finds comfort in his own outward willingness to bear what life throws his way.

The most notable aspect of Feeling Through is its advertised casting, Tarango as the ‘first DeafBlind lead in a motion picture.’ Make of that what you will, it’s hard to imagine Feeling Through will gather much more of a viewing audience than what it already has, a campaign driven by the short’s projection for free on YouTube over the recent months. But even then, Feeling Through doesn’t uniquely campaign as a signal for disability – it paved its way to the red carpet with a deeply magnetic sweetness, a sentimental story of the camaraderie that binds us together even when the world seems antagonistically cynical. Prescod especially nails his role, giving his all into an undeniable simplicity that lands at the most perfect moment of human ‘togetherness’ an Oscar nom could ask for. – ST

THE LETTER ROOM (USA)

Coming hot into the ceremony of Oscars, Oscar Isaac leads The Letter Room as corrections officer Richard, a recently transferred soul amongst the souls, taking in the observations of his surrounding jail system like, well, a man with little else to distract himself with. He sounds finds more curiosity in his daily habits, becoming enmeshed in the personal letters and lives being sent in by a deeply affected young woman (Alia Shawkat).

By nature of its star pedigree alone, The Letter Room is the most high profile of this year’s live action crop. Isaac seems almost too perfectly suited for these sorts of roles – gruff exterior with a hidden animosity, foreign-language speaking with an extremely well-timed sense of comedic expression when the visual punchline lands. Alongside his riches, The Letter Room tries to bat around one or two too many ideas – among its undiscerning coverage includes the nature of human connection, reform of the American prison system, how we choose to fabricate ourselves under the veil of distance. Elvira Lind’s film gets a lot of its attention more or less deserved despite this, providing one of the more entertaining steps in getting voters through this year’s grief-filled shorts ballot, without ever swaying too far from the ‘united we stand’ of the current times. – ST

WHITE EYE (ISRAEL)

On a calm night in Tel Aviv, native Israeli Omer (Daniel Gad) spots what he believes to be his recently stolen bicycle locked outside of a small industrial building. He begins to retrieve his bike, figuring his best to saw off the lock, when Yunes (Dawti Tekelaeb) overhears him. A black immigrant, Yunes confronts Omer in a defensive manner, claiming that he bought the bicycle himself, though noticeably not wanting to get into a larger confrontation.

It’s a wonder how this spin on the general ideas of Bicycle Thieves didn’t wander onto the Oscar stage sooner. Ayn Levana’s White Eye concerns the tone that imperialism and its tendencies have swept throughout his home country of Israel, and how citizens more often than not turn a blind eye to the loss of humanity being cast out from under their feet. Shot in one seemingly continuous take, White Eye takes a very complicated, deeply conscious message and renders it simplistic, an easy-to-follow story about racial bias laid on the grounding infrastructure of how the working class keeps to their livelihood. This writer’s personal favorite of this year’s nominated live action catalog, a dynamic and beautifully-filmed piece on the ambiguous value of our fellow man, and stands out with a bleak intelligence within a crowd that never reaches the same standard of poignant authenticity. – ST

THE PRESENT (PALESTINE)

On his wedding anniversary, Yusef and his young daughter set out in the West Bank to buy his wife a gift. Between soldiers, segregated roads and checkpoints, how easy would it be to go shopping?

Not easy is the obvious response. Yusef has to pass Israeli checkpoints every time he goes out and this time there are problems. He’s forced to wait in a holding cell at the border whilst the officers presumably check his identification. The frustration and injustice is amplified by the presence of his daughter who has to sit and wait whilst all this is happening. The added drama of her wetting herself and leaving her coat behind pushes the boundaries of melodramatic manipulation. The clear difference between the Israeli and Palestinian characters (friendly vs. hostile) also leaves no room for interpretation in what is an emotionally manipulative criticism of the Israeli occupation.

TWO DISTANT STRANGERS (USA)

In Two Distant Strangers, graphic designer Carter James’ repeated attempts to get home to his dog are thwarted by a recurring deadly encounter that forces him to re-live the same awful day over and over again.

That awful day is getting killed by a cop. Not just in one way, but in the multiple ways cops have already killed innocent black men and women. Here’s a list of my thoughts when watching this film:

• It’s Joey Bada$$
• There’s robot dog treat dispensers with cameras?
• [Pulling out a shiny cigarette case from his backpack] please don’t create this into a moment where a policeman kills him
• Wow. They really have him shouting “I can’t breathe” whilst being choked by a cop. A strange tribute.
• It’s a bad dream? No wait it’s a time loop.
• Let’s re-enact some other infamous ways cops have killed black people recently?
• Using the names of victims to give this credibility
• Surely not… no… his blood really pooled in the shape of Africa

It’s uncomfortable watching all the references to the different ways black people have been murdered by cops in such a light-hearted and care-free fashion. What might have been good intentions just comes across like a horrifically insensitive ‘Pepsi commercial’ tribute to all the black people murdered by police.

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.

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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

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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

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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

By Sebastian Torrelio & Rowan Sullivan

Watching the 2023 Oscar shorts is the quickest and easiest way to get closer to watching all of the Oscar contenders. So if you’re looking for something to say about the Academy Awards this week, check these short films out at cinemas near you.

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The Animated 2023 Oscar Shorts

An Ostrich Told Me the World is Fake and I Think I Believe It (Australia)

Neil (Pendragon himself) works at a computer doing… something. He finds himself on the daily commute to his office from… somewhere. There’s always a deadline and schedule to meet at the corporation of… mysterious account. Luckily, Neil finds therapeutic understanding in an office ostrich (John Cavanagh), who reveals to him much of what the audience already understands: the fourth wall is what keeps Neil from his destiny, a life unfettered from the benign banality of… some such.

The strangest among the crop of this year’s nominees—usually a feat within itself, but here even more so—An Ostrich colludes camera trickery and unexplained plot thickening to the benefit of anyone wondering how stop motion became so relevant in today’s industry again. Pendragon maintains his win for the Australian Student Academy Award for the short, a sign of creative breakthrough, if not some trust from a system ready to hold their faith above the absurd. For his inventive framing and perceptions, further recognition for Pendragon wouldn’t be unwarranted. -ST

Ice Merchants (Portugal)

Doing more with silence than the rest of this year’s dialogue-minimal shorts combined, Gonzalez’s artistic depiction of father-son relationships at their brink is a tragedy bred from circumstances beyond our comprehension. Curiously isolated from their matriarch, the two undergo a baffling daily routine: freezing water from atop their lofty cliffside home, plummeting down to merchandise in the valley town below, and steadily making their way back up for supper and sleep. This goes on until powers beyond their own force a spontaneous break from habit.

Gonzalez won this year’s Annie Award for Best Short Subject, a notice of interest to the Academy’s voters as beneficial as any. Ice Merchants will go down with or without the Oscar as one of the most lauded short films in the program’s history, running the festival circuit mercilessly from a deliriously colorful skypoint. Yet the short, more clever than it ever leads its hand with, emotionally seals a justified landing even when all seems lost; maybe it could do so on Oscar night just the same. -ST

My Year of Dicks (U.S.)

Screenwriter Pamela Ribon, noted for her work on Moana and Ralph Breaks the Internet, recounts a tumultuous time of her youth growing up in 1990s Houston. As the title implies, Pam (Brie Tilton) has to go through the shapes, shades, warts and wont’s of securing an appointment to lose her virginity at age 15. Nearly everything that can comedically go wrong does, along with the sprinklings of interactions with the worst vibe checks boys of the Gen X era can muster. 

Like the teenage transition to womanhood, My Year of Dicks is, at times, appropriately excruciating. Originally conceived for episodic broadcast on FX, Gunnarsdóttir mixes visual styles not unlike an experimental web series would, drawing from anime and Adult Swim alike. My Year of Dicks, humorously landing its place in Oscar history by name alone, won’t receive more appreciation than it already commands – but a cute story, wrapped tightly in a bow near invisible in the making, goes a long way when the promised entertainment is begotten by just the sheer mention of, ahem, “Dicks.” -ST

The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse (U.K.)

Starting from the beginning, a boy (Jude Coward Nicoll) and a mole (Tom Hollander) find solace in each other’s company – snow encasing anything they know familiar, stuck in the outside to look for simple comforts. From there joins an untame fox and a curiously mythical horse. Slowly, by biblical pace more so than by weariness, the boy and his growing cohort of creatures set off to discover a home they seem to know nothing about, acknowledging their victory sign may be no clearer than their starting post, dashed and covered in a layer of snowed-out ambiguity.

Based on Mackesy’s own children’s book illustrations, the Apple TV+ short submission goes a long way for voters simply judging by its cover alone. Evoking the charismatic comforts of Winnie the Pooh better the most animated products of the last half century, Baynton and Mackesy find established ground in weening all the self-important hagiographic sayings they can out of the playbook, a 32-minute short denser on morality principles than animal tendencies. If that sounds outside the banner of trustworthy quality, then you’ve found yourself outside the voting body, which lauded the film heavily at this year’s Annie Awards for frontrunning commendation. -ST

The Flying Sailor (Canada)

Animation is far from the only field in which the incomprehensible can be submitted as fact, but it certainly is one of the more audacious options. In the collision of 2D and 3D effects, a story is brought forth a century later – the impact of two fully-barged shipping vessels in Halifax 1917 that caused an impromptu explosion so large, it defied physics and deductive reasoning. A lone sailor, sent coursing miles into the sky, landed near naked, bodily, fully intact in a neighboring district.

For all its duration spent in the heavens above Nova Scotia, The Flying Sailor is capriciously shallow, a work of blanketed humor that singes one of the most traumatic events in recorded Canadian history down to a portly man, flailing nude with exposed penis, silhouetting overhead an endless mass of clouded smoke. It truly does not get more symbolic or understated than that – and so there is little else to note. -ST

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The Documentary 2023 Oscar Shorts

Haulout (U.K.)

In this year’s requisite piece of climate change pleading, the siblings Arbugaev film scientist Maxim Chakilev on his journey through the Russian arctic, treading along sheets of ice and terrain in search of the titular ‘haulout’ – a rare, though predictable phenomenon months in the making that roots all of Maxim’s biological studies in a habitat changing before his eyes.

What appears at first to be the account of a northern hermit eventually reveals itself to be a very surreal account of elder traditions continuing in an ecosystem that may not allow them for much longer. Haulout hinges on the reveal of its premise, a uniquely-played shift in tone so sudden it borders on outrageously funny. The surprise is the documentary’s key element – in today’s world, so much scientific warning can only warrant so much shock at the incitement of worsening conditions, even at the furthest reaches of what one could mistake for civilization. ‘They’ don’t seem to happy about the sudden shift of things either… -ST

How Do You Measure a Year (U.S.)

From ages two through 18, experimental filmmaker Rosenblatt films his daughter on the same couch, with the same medium-close camera angle, asking her a script of half-broadstroke, half-maudlin questions concerning personal life, existentialist ideas, future aspirations and youthful tendencies. How Do You Measure a Year? takes a “Rent” quote and uses it to capitalize on an idea any parent would find fun and engaging – to reject nihilism by means of documenting their child’s mental state in real time, a project born out of either a hyperfixed, uncool philosophy, or boredom. One assumes with this filmmaker it’s the former.

Rosenblatt was here last year with one of the most intrepidly thickheaded Oscar shorts in recent memory, When We Were Bullies. His follow-up release doesn’t carry nearly the same broken stigma of a man who can’t read what he’s putting on paper, though it does leave one to wonder why such nuttiness continues unabated. For every incredibly useless question Rosenblatt posits (asking his toddler about societal power), the value of How Do You Measure a Year? seems to come back around, ending on a sentimental going-away note that Rosenblatt surely didn’t predict – for he can’t see the future even half as well as his daughter can evoke the values of the present. -ST

Stranger at the Gate (U.S.)

Seftel takes a camera to Mac McKinney, a war veteran framed as the epitome of anti-terrorism succumbing to his own demons. A former U.S. Marine, Mac details the internal horrors the foreign battlefront left him with, a relentless need to silence the residents of a local mosque, people for which he can see no other face besides the ones the American government has taught him to hate for chapters of his familial growth and defensive experience.

Stranger at the Gate may be among the most controversial of this year’s short film entries, for nothing more than its indecisive carefree inhabitance of ‘we-are-the-world’ hand-holding. Mac McKinney, a burly figure with tattoos aplenty, is given incredible narrative force to speak his mind, often with confounding truthfulness. This is the story of a soldier’s settling moments with his own consciousness, and not so much a lament of the systems that got him there. Where religious freedoms care to spread, Stranger at the Gate is not an assurance that local communities are really following. -ST

The Elephant Whisperers (India)

Bomman and Belli are a loving couple who hold a heralded status in South India, recognized for their skillful tract and familiarity with local wildlife, exotic and unbecoming as they emerge. The Elephant Whisperers focuses on their relationship with one particular orphan Raghu, a curious boy of assumed intelligence who grows resiliently under their protective care. Whether Raghu establishes lived-in roots as one of his own kind is another question, Bomman and Belli taking it upon themselves to prove an ecological service unheard of to their indigenous communities.

The Elephant Whisperers benefits from its cinematography more than anything, decorated production value relayed in the capturing of effervescent colors, splendid close-ups of the childlike mammals in the reserve, guiding a perspective that comes across as more relatable and illuminating to the relationship of pet and owner than Hollywood has been capable of recreating in years past. Don’t let the Netflix-branding fool you from Gonsalves’ cinematic depiction of comforting sensibility, a brokered chronicle of man and animal that alleviates much worry that this year’s documentary field will emotionally overwhelm more than it will sympathize and engross. -ST

The Martha Mitchell Effect (U.S.)

The wife of John Mitchell, the Attorney General and campaign manager for President Richard Nixon, would never tolerate being so simply referred to as just ‘the wife of an Attorney General.’ Martha held esteem through her incredibly vocal appearances, on the press cycles and the talk show circuit alike, speaking her mind aligned to the Republican majority only in shucked responsibility. For Martha was a stronger tabloid than Nixon could even control, embedding herself into the Watergate scandal for better or worse, a woman whose job was never to keep the peace when such unscrupulous leaders were present.

Netflix’s The Martha Mitchell Effect could very easily be mistaken for a network TV expose, if not for the documentary’s consistently enamored takes of Martha’s visage. What Alvergue & McClutchy’s short lacks in political treatise toward anything that couldn’t be found in the most listened-to Spotify podcasts, it mostly accounts for by keeping Martha front-and-center, a figure of emotional and understandable stock, who fought for her beliefs in spite of a politically-dealt decade that would consistently let her down. Whistleblowers have been recounted with more inspiration in recent years, but one could do worse for stories of emblazoned righteousness. -ST

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The Live Action 2023 Oscar Shorts

An Irish Goodbye (Ireland)

Following the untimely death of their mother, a young man with Down syndrome and his estranged brother discover her unfulfilled bucket list.

Maybe this will be helped by all the voters who liked Banshees of Inisherin, but not enough to rank it in their first few spots. An Irish Goodbye, has a lot of fecks, moaning, and dry humor. It also has two more great Irish names in Turlough and Lorcan – ironic considering it was directed by a Tom and a Ross. However, despite it’s attempt to balance dark humor and warm feelings, it ends up a bit too saccharine. – RS

Ivalu (Denmark)

Ivalu is gone. Her little sister is desperate to find her and her father does not care. The vast Greenlandic nature holds secrets. Where is Ivalu?

Interestingly, Ivalu is co-directed the director behind Greenland’s first feature film directed by a woman, Anori, which we’ve previously reviewed for FilmRoot. Ivalu also contains a mystery enhanced by the harsh but beautiful Greenlandic landscape. However, it also carries some of Anori‘s flaws – the flashbacks of Ivalu cut with snippets of her sister searching for her, never build up enough suspense for the predictable pay-off. -RS

Le Pupille (Italy, U.S.)

Le Pupille brings you into a Catholic Orphanage during Christmas in the height of the Second World War. Despite the frugal times and strict Mother Superior, the girls find joy in a few magical scenes reminiscent of the wonder of early cinema.

In the Catholic Orphanage, objects are a scarcity. Unlike the often stuffy materialism of today’s modern world, the girls in Le Pupille live in large rooms with very few things around them. The frugality in front of the camera is also seen in the film’s production. Le Pupille was shot completely on film, and therefore all of the special effects are completely VFX free. This gives the film a playful magic that feels like the wonder of the Melies’ silent films. In one scene a baby appears out of thin air (from one shot to the next), whilst a freeze-framed shouting Mother Superior conveys shock from what feels like the kids perspective in another. It’s this simplicity both in front of the camera (with the limited objects and distractions) and behind the camera (in the production process) that makes this short Christmas film feel playful.  -RS

Night Ride (Norway)

Night Ride is another Christmas short (I guess Academy members binge their shorts over the Holiday season). It’s premise is mildly amusing: Ebba unwittingly hi-jacks a tram and decides to play out the role of tram driver. However, it quickly takes a very un-festive turn. Just as we’re enjoying some laid back humor, a trans-woman is assaulted right under our noses. Then in an uncomfortable 180, our lead character becomes a ‘hero’ for ‘identifying’ with the assaulted woman.

It’s a shame, because Night Ride starts off pretty humorously. It could have been an enjoyable festive short, but instead chose to use transphobia as a tool to develop the character of the cisgender lead. -RS

The Red Suitcase (Luxembourg)

A veiled 16 year old Iranian teenager is terrified to take her red suitcase from the carousel at the Luxembourg Airport for fear of being identified by her fiancé. Her fear grows with every second in the face of what awaits her beyond the gate.

Like Riz Ahmed’s The Long Goodbye (last year’s winner), Cyrus Neshvad’s The Red Suitcase does a great job of plunging you into a situation and ramping up the tension quickly. It’s not initially clear what the girl is afraid of. The film doesn’t waste time telling you who she is, where she is, or where she’s come from. Instead we learn bits about her through the action. It’s pure chase-thriller and has no excess in its tight 17 minute run time. -RS

By Sebastian Torrelio & Rowan Sullivan

Watching the 2024 Oscar shorts is the quickest and easiest way to get closer to watching all of the Oscar contenders. So if you’re looking for something to say about this year’s Academy Awards, check out these short films at cinemas near you.

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The Animated 2024 Oscar Shorts

Letter to a Pig (Israel)

Divided into two halves, the Animation Is Film Festival winner follows a Holocaust survivor’s story to a classroom of primarily ungrateful students, mocking his age and confounding seriousness when discussing his friendship to an unnamed pig. Slowly, the story shrinks to the focus of Alma, one schoolgirl who breaks the film into high fantasy – a torturous dream that evokes the cruel mob mentality of the past.

The average animation viewer will put a lot of prestige on the more creative visual displays, those films that take place in a dimension unseen to human eyes, whether it be felt or caricature. Letter to a Pig may not be the single most creative concept in the running this year, but it is the most immediately stunning – live action footage overdrawn with an extreme amount of minimalist line drawing. That minimalism, its biggest asset, is unfortunately quickly trumped by a dogged amalgamation of trauma and historical setbacks, resulting in more curiosity than rousing passion. -ST

Ninety-Five Senses (U.S.)

Coy is a senior citizen reflecting on the power and nostalgia that his five primary senses have brought him presented in a curiously dark order. Voiced by Tim Blake Nelson, Coy plays along with a chronology of significant events in his life, milestones marked by entertainment, love, ambition and eventually, death.

The Hess pair of directors & writers, using their Oscar nomination to eclipse their Napoleon Dynamite fame before piloting the upcoming Minecraft adaptation, have created something special with Ninety-Five Senses, a shockingly dramatic story that revels equally in its diverse and various styles of hand-drawn animation as it does its dramaturgy. While fishing for emotion where the wandering tales of an old man seem silly at best, the Hess’ make a sincere and effective plea for compassion and forgiveness within one’s own perspective, a deceiving victory if this year’s short film lineup needed at least one to speak for. -ST

Our Uniform (Iran)

Following a bit of unique structural storytelling, Our Uniform unravels a traditional Iranian schoolgirl’s daily attire to discuss the conventions that present with a young woman’s own identity. By taking the shirt, label, sleeve and linings bit-by-bit, colors and patterns reveal a creative tapestry by which the unnamed narrator contemplates her own femininity while dissecting what details about her past marked her outer shell most permanently.

At seven minutes, Our Uniform is the shortest Oscar nominee at this year’s induction, though an argument could made that it is also the prettiest – the carry-on textures Moghaddam uses to bring the girls themselves into their own environment, a schoolhouse or a road along which to travel, is immediately captivating. Naturally, with such briefness some a slight narrative, Our Uniform ending on more of a mid-sentence brushaway than anything resembling a punctuating note of contemplation. It is, simply, brief and honest, a meditation on time that has very little of it to spare. -ST

Pachyderme (France)

A young girl named Louise spends a routine summer with her grandparents, playing on swing sets and swimming in the local lagoon. Her small figure is stiff and roughed, overwhelmed by huge locks of hair that gives Louise a fairy-like physicality, matching the ethereal wonder of her painted world. Louise reveals that she thinks a lot about monsters, one in particular, who haunts her holiday trip, disrupting her innocent countryside summer.

Pachyderm is a deeply interesting, though uncompelling, experiment for the same reasons that make its nomination so intrinsic. It feels as though every year at least one animated short beckons a darker form of animation serving as trauma vehicle, small-form character arcs already knee-deep in an uncompromising past. A struggle with subtlety erupts in Pachyderm, the delicacy of Louise’s life at odds with her vague notions to disassociate. Where terrifying stories of childhood instability often layer into the hurt of residual mental warfare, Clément’s route is dark and lonely, a small light in an otherwise clouded vision. -ST

War is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko (U.S.)

On opposite trenches at the climax of World War I, two frontline soldiers for the unnamed sides spread their free time out with the least leisurely round of chess ever played. By sending a carrier pigeon back-and-forth without their superiors’ knowledge, the two engage in a bout of metaphors, the escalation of their own board game matching the severity of the embattlements supressing their allies just outside their doors.

With a production credit by Sean Ono Lennon, WAR IS OVER! may win the Oscar on sheer starpower alone. The traces of the short’s development and press tour even go back to herald Peter Jackson, with Unreal animation done by his partner-owned Wētā FX Limited. It makes perfect sense, then, that WAR IS OVER! is easily the most treacly short of the animated roster, a laughable sentiment gone wrong that peace can overcome anything – or, at least that the power of Christmas, when John Lennon is the baron of tidings, is stronger than thought and diplomacy (if you want it). -ST

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The Documentary 2024 Oscar Shorts

ABC’s Of Book Banning (U.S.)

Over 2,000 books have been removed from school districts in the U.S. The ABC’s of Book Banning follows the human toll the future will pay for depriving children of their right to read and learn about a complex world. Interviews with children and authors shed light on this ongoing dangerous precedent.

An important message made for screen with the elegance of a PowerPoint slide, ABC’s of Book Banning tries and fails to live up to the urgency and creativity that influencer-activists convey on TikTok. This documentary short interviews recognizable names (Judy Blume, Amanda Gorman) with cute kids, including one with a luscious mullet, to tell us that book banning is bad. Unfortunately, there’s little interest in the interviewees beyond snappy headline quotes, and the same surface-level overview emanates from the films slap-dash presentation. Despite the potential fodder of the polarizing subject, this is arguably the worst short of the bunch. -RS

Island In Between (Taiwan)

The islands of Kinmen sit as a barred entryway for the Taiwanese people to the Chinese mainland, a beachside land of sand and honey that serves as a focal point in the history of the Chinese Civil War. Remnants of that history soak in the seawater while the skyscrapers of modern China loom just miles away, visible over the horizon, as a symbol of the continued tension and growing disparity between the two nations, or so it would visually seem.

As cursory as they come, Island in Between might be the lightest and most immediately forgettable documentary in this year’s nominee pool, an already congested pipeline of nonfiction blandness. Like a teaser for something bigger and greater, Chiang’s story relies heavily on the immediate reliability of his subjects, their island fever boiled into something more sustained, a sunken propaganda-state they know no bounds from. For Island in Between to work, so must the direct shift to the political perspective of the mainland, a porthole Chiang’s film simply doesn’t seem to have the time for. -ST

Nai Nai & Wai Po (U.S.)

Sean Wang’s two grandmothers live in the same household, the best of friends – one from his maternal side, one paternal. They share in most everything together, co-opting each others lives as their own responsibilities for upkeep in this new post-pandemic world they’ve found themselves. With no left to care for otherwise, Wang’s Nai Nai and his Wài Pó confront the rest of their time together with love, fear, and comical sincerity.

Wang gained an immense amount of timely attention for his Sundance Award-winning feature debut Didi, which rose in profile around the same time his short received Oscar attention. It should be noticed, however, that Nai Nai & Wài Pó nonetheless stands as the least tedious of this year’s documentary shorts. Wang is easily able to immortalize his grandmothers’ wisdom and humor within the short’s brief runtime, a contemplation on the inevitabilities of life and beyond that speaks without hesitation to the reality we find ourselves in at the final crossroads – not alone, and absolutely not unfulfilled. -ST

The Barber of Little Rock (U.S.)

The Barber of Little Rock explores America’s widening racial wealth gap through the story of Arlo Washington, a self-made businessman who founds a non-profit bank to uplift a community that has been largely excluded from the financial engines that create wealth.

A pleasing documentary about a man set on uplifting his community – first through the barber occupation, and secondly adapting to a traditionally inhospitable banking community. The portrayal of the protagonists is so positive that it toes the hagiographic line, making you feel a bit skeptical of the many hugs and charitable grants Washington issues to community members on film; “is it all just for the camera?.” This isn’t helped by the style of the documentary which recalls the same inspirational lens flares over-used by political nominees in their TV campaigns. Skepticism aside, the message is an important one and a sign that the traditionally conservative Academy board is evolving. -RS

The Last Repair Shop (U.S.)

The most effective of this year’s doc shorts at giving perspective to the lower class (though, ironically, also the most well-funded courtesy of Searchlight Pictures), The Last Repair Shop dives anthologically into the backgrounds of four supervising craftsmen who maintain the host of instruments used by children across the Los Angeles Unified School District. In the reaches of downtown LA, all four subjects relate their own upbringing to the value they place in music education, both as a tool for extracurricular guidance and the harmonious lives they lead as experts in a career built on service to underrepresented parts of the community.

Bowers has been on a hot streak recognizable to even the most unsavvy Oscar voters – aside from his original score work on Green Book and The Color Purple, he was previously nominated in this same category for A Concerto Is a Conversation, a documentary that distilled the creator’s own legacy as a composer and instrumentalist into the lineage of Hollywood’s history far beyond his own. The Last Repair Shop, a semi-apparent sequel, ties its subjects even more succinctly than Concerto, a more diverse ensemble remarkable not only for earning their career-driven stripes but from how eclectic those stripes are in unison, coming together in uplifting & wonderfully empathetic fashion. -ST

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The Live Action 2024 Oscar Shorts

The After (U.K.)

David Oyelowo finds himself in one of the most overly-dramatic Live Action shorts of recent times as we watch him unfold his range of emotions to a cheesy choice of backing tracks.

The After starts off in familiar territory; a father connecting with his daughter, but takes a wildly dramatic turn in an instant. The randomness of the sudden tonal shift is like reading a story written by a kid that has just discovered the art of story-telling; “I like the sand-pit and SHARKS ARE EATING THE FISH.” It’s worth watching for the comic effect the set-up unintentionally produces. To the film’s credit, it does recover the mood for a few scenes in which Oyelowo is silent. Missed calls and everyday conversations symbolize his loneliness. However, the film tries to outdo the dramatic start with an equally dramatic ending, bringing an awkwardly in-your-face crescendo succeeded by a awkwardly comforting song choice. Is this a secret comedy? – RS

Invincible (Canada)

Inspired by a true story, Invincible recounts the last 48 hours in the life of Marc-Antoine Bernier, a 14-year-old boy on a desperate quest for freedom.

Invincible feels very similar to the films of Xavier Dolan (I Killed My Mother, Mommy). All feature unruly teenagers situated in Francophone Canada struggling with their parents and themselves. The grainy, slightly faded look of the film combined with the abundance of nature emphasizes their angst. There’s too much natural physical space around them to make themselves feel significant. Invincible is an unusual pick for the Academy Awards, but a worthy one. It’s well-made and captures the unsettled mind of young Marc-Antoine authentically, even if the style and subject matter isn’t wholly fresh. – RS

Knight of Fortune (Denmark)

The loss of a loved one, the grief, the risk of yellow skin, and a coffin, this is too much for Karl to face. It is much easier to fix a broken lamp. A chance encounter with a stranger will help him face his pain.

Surprisingly, the makers behind Knight of Fortune have no apparent connection to the last Danish Live Action Short nominee, On My Mind (maybe there are just a lot of loyal Danish filmmakers on the voting committee). Both are about widowers confronting their grief in unique ways – On My Mind with karaoke and Knight of Fortune with an intriguing stranger. Knight of Fortune is better than On My Mind. Firstly, it’s not manipulatively holding back a reveal, and secondly it’s odd-ball humor comes much more naturally with the chemistry between the two leads. – RS

Red, White, and Blue (U.S.)

Rachel is a single parent living paycheck to paycheck. When an unexpected pregnancy threatens to unravel her already precarious position, she’s forced to cross state lines in search of an abortion.

Heavily influenced by Never, Rarely, Sometimes, Always, this follows another woman that heads on the road in search of abortion rights. It has a similarly grainy look and even the lead actors look similar. However, Red, White, and Blue hides an ace in its hand in the third act. It’s an ace that gives the short its oomph, but also leans into the extreme to convey a simple message; abortion rights should be protected. – RS

The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (U.K.)

A Road Dahl story about a rich man who learns about a guru who can see without using his eyes and then sets out to master the skill in order to cheat at gambling.

The A-List short of this year’s nominees. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar features Benedict Cumberbatch, Ralph Fiennes, Dev Patel, Ben Kingsley, and Richard Ayoade. It’s also directed by Wes Anderson, who surprisingly, has never won an Oscar. As the clear favorite, this might be the way he finally gets his Oscar recognition, and it would be deservingly so. It features the trademark Wes Anderson style – heavily curated production design and color schemes, with quirky storytelling – but is backed by quality source material from a bonafide story-teller. This is the Oscar shorts; we’ve seen Two Distant Strangers knock out Oscar Isaac, but surely this is Wes Anderson’s time. -RS