Every year when the Oscar nominations roll around, my favorite categories to check are the short film nominees – Best Documentary Short Subject, Best Short Film (Animated), and Best Short Film (Live Action). While these are all titles that made the Academy Awards’ Shortlist earlier in the season, these tend to be some of the most unpredictable nominees of the ceremony. They are also notoriously difficult to predict. I don’t care who is telling they have the answer, with the short films, there are almost always surprises.
This year’s nominees are a mixed bag – there are a few incredibly strong standouts in each category, and even one or two masterpieces among them, but there are a fair number of dreadful choices this year as well.
Best Documentary Short Subject
I really wanted Sheila Nevins’s The ABCs of Book Banning to be a much better than it was. I agree with everything the filmmakers are trying to convey, but the methods they use aren’t effective. By showing the books that have been banned, challenged, or restricted without context for why those challenges have been issued, the filmmakers have done a grave disservice to the viewers. We’re left to interpret the reasons a particular book has been challenged, based on what we know of the content and the author’s identity. But there are times these bans are for reasons that are not immediately obvious. So, while I enjoyed hearing from the students who were touched and moved by these banned books, the structure and omission of essential facts makes the film come across as misleading propaganda – propaganda from a side I happen to agree with, but propaganda, nonetheless.
John Hoffman and Christine Turner’s The Barber of Little Rock is a hopeful and inspiring portrait of one man’s attempt to make changes within his community through education and making the systems of finance more accessible within the Black community. It’s beautifully shot, filled with compelling interviews, and lays out intriguing methods for change within historically oppressed and marginalized communities. As part of Turner’s overall project of documenting Black lives making an impact within their community – through art or activism, through care or compassion – this is a really lovely addition to an already impressive body of short documentaries.
Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers’s The Last Repair Shop is a profoundly moving short documentary. It’s especially effective in the ways it moves between student and instrument repair person, looking at the kids who need the repair services, while really digging deep into the histories of those whose labor is often invisible to us. The individual narratives within the film are varied and move from the poignant to the hilarious, and the overall impact is incredibly powerful. The filmmakers’ choices around identifying some musicians and leaving others anonymous in the final recording session is mystifying, blunting the emotional impact of what should be a stirring finale. That’s a minor complaint, but it stands out in a short that is otherwise magnificent.
Sean Wang’s Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó is such a charming and enjoyable little doc. While the subject may not cover wide-ranging, major social issues, it is a poignant look at aging and what it takes for elderly folks to be able to live independently. There’s a liveliness and vivacious energy to the two grandmothers in this film that is a joy to watch, and the editing and camera work match their wry sense of humor. At the same time, the film never loses sight of their sense of mortality and the painful losses they’ve felt. This is a wonderful short documentary.
Prediction: The ABCs of Book Banning
Spoiler: The Last Repair Shop
Preference: The Last Repair Shop (though I’d be happy if The Barber of Little Rock or Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó won as well)
Best Short Film (Animated)
Tal Kantor’s Letter to a Pig is an absolutely stunning animated short. The animation is gorgeous and haunting, a reflection on a what a Holocaust survivor went through o escape the Nazi’s. But the story quickly turns into something darker and more menacing as the film reflects on the ways the oppressed can become oppressors, the ways that the traumas of the past can make us hardened and cruel, passed down through the generations – all told through beautiful and surreal animation.
The use of fabric textures as part of the animation is stunning in Yegane Moghaddam’s Our Uniform. It helps tell the story of enforced clothing restrictions growing up as a girl in Iran. The narrative may be slight, but the exploration of clothing as an extension of identity is beautifully rendered – as are the ways that more patriarchal and restrictive communities and cultures use clothing to restrict and tamp down women and girl’s identities and individuality. This is a very compelling piece of short animation.
Stéphanie Clément’s Pachyderm is a stunning memory film that follows a young woman reflecting on childhood vacations spent with her grandparents. The animation is truly wondrous, and the narrative continues to grow and evolve until we understand the scope of the story and the hidden truths behind the narrator’s childhood fears. It’s an incredibly beautiful and absolutely haunting film.
Jared Hess and Jerusha Hess’s Ninety-Five Senses is a solid animated short that uses multiple animators employing different styles for each segment exploring the body’s senses. The film carries us along its spare narrative by slowly opening itself and revealing more and more about the narrator with each subsequent lesson about the senses. The film makes a significant misstep in attempting to force the audience to have more sympathy for a man who has committed terrible violence on others than those he inflicted that violence upon. It keeps what could have been a truly heartbreaking film about consequences and the mistakes of our past from fully landing.
Dave Mullins’s WAR IS OVER! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko is a wretched work of nepotism. The trench warfare, the pigeon passing chess moves between enemy lines, the battle… While it’s competently constructed, it all smacks of cheap sentimentality. And when the John and Yoko song comes on – a song that doesn’t fit with anything we’ve just seen – it’s saccharine and emotionally manipulative. None of these elements work together – the World War I setting, the comic beat, the carnage and brutality, especially the song… And yet, because it appeals to Boomer nostalgia and viewer sentimentality, it receives award nominations.
Prediction: War Is Over
Spoiler: None
Preference: Letter to a Pig (though I’d be very happy is Pachyderm or Our Uniform won)
Misan Harriman’s The After is an abysmal short film. Opening with a horrific act of violence is one thing but staging it in such a clumsy and insensitive way shows a profound lack of awareness and understanding of trauma on the part of the filmmaker – an understanding that this film is purportedly attempting to foster. The middle section of the film is where it’s the strongest, dipping in and out of passengers’ lives, all of whom are unaware of the pain that their driver is carrying (though every scene in which he is alone is shot like music video or the “before” scene in a car commercial). But the ending is the real clincher – it once again shows a profound lack of understanding about how people process and move through trauma and grief. This is a wretched film.
Vincent René-Lortie’s Invincible is a solid enough short film, even if the narrative bookends don’t completely work – foreshadowing the ending the way it does may create a sense of doom, but it also undercuts all subsequent sequences in which the protagonist makes any real progress. It also leaves us questioning many of the assumptions the narrative makes – that the protagonist is the one and only kid in this reform program who shows real potential for change, the one with a natural talent for poetry… There’s no real exploration of why he leaves the program, what behavior got him sent to the reform program in the first place – just that he’s a brilliant but troubled kid who wants to leave. It’s beautifully shot and well-performed, but it merely skims the surface.
Lasse Lyskjær Noer’s Knight of Fortune is an incredibly charming short exploring grief and loss, what it means to let go someone you love. The performances in here are all wonderful, and the narrative twist at the film’s midpoint is delightful. This is the type of short that could have easily become too saccharine or mawkish. But it consistently uses droll humor to undercut cheap sentimentality and come to a genuinely moving ending about the need to let go. This is a really wonderful little film.
Politically, I agree with everything that Nazrin Choudhury’s Red, White and Blue is trying to say – and the film is even very well-acted and decently shot and constructed. But this is a film that is so clearly constructed as a piece of propaganda that, when the “shocking” twist happens toward the end of the film, it left such a sour taste in my mouth. This is blatant emotional manipulation, a commercial for abortion rights in a time when all rights are being stripped away, using the crassest possible tools to shock people into supporting the cause. And as others have said, we need to be telling the stories of ordinary women who are being denied abortions, not just sensationalizing the issue by highlighting the most extreme cases. This is an exploitive film that does nothing to truly further the cause.
Wes Anderson’s The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar is a masterful and inventive adaptation of literature, incorporating prose into the performers’ dialogue and performances, utilizing the trapping of the proscenium stage with set pieces that roll into place, emphasizing the artifice of the production, the tools and tricks of filmmaking and theatrical staging. And the artifice only heightens the emotional power of the central narrative, a redemption story told through multiple narrative digressions buried within narrative digressions. It all moves so fast that by the time we realize what Anderson is doing, it’s too late and we find ourselves caught off-guard by the emotional power and resonance of the story. This is a beautiful, wondrous little film.
Prediction: The After
Spoiler: I’d love to see The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar win, but I don’t think the Academy voters will give Wes Anderson an award for a category they feel is for beginning filmmakers, so I think, unfortunately, the spoiler will be something like Red, White and Blue.
Preference: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar
While you can find some of the films on various streaming platforms right now, all of the short films are available as part of the 19th Annual Oscar Nominated Short Film releases, presented by ShortsTV. You can find a theater playing the programs near you at http://www.shorts.tv/theoscarshorts.
The animated shorts program also include two highly commended shorts, Wild Summon and I’m Hip.
Karni Arieli and Saul Freed’s Wild Summon is an incredibly inventive and truly harrowing animated short. Personifying the life cycle of wild salmon by transforming them into human figures swimming through creeks and streams, making their way to the ocean and back to their spawning grounds, underscores how difficult their lives are and how horrific human treatment of animals can truly be. The blend of live-action and animation is stunning and leaves us reflecting on questions of intelligence and suffering within the animal kingdom.
John Musker’s I’m Hip is a perfectly pleasant music/comedic short taking aim at those who wear their sense of being cool and hip on their sleeve – the insufferable pretentiousness that can be found in college dorms, coffee shops, or anywhere men are eager to over-explain things to anyone eager to listen. It’s all pretty surface-level satire, and the joke begins to wear thin after first minute and a half. But it’s fun for the most part.
