The Oscars producers and ABC might not think anybody cares about the short-film awards, but that doesn’t mean the rest of us have to agree. The shorts categories are always a place where curious viewers can discover quite a lot, from up-and-coming filmmakers (Martin McDonagh, Andrea Arnold, and Taylor Hackford have all won short-film Oscars, while Taika Waititi has been nominated) to the kind of excellent, thoughtful filmmaking you won’t see anywhere else.
Also, you want to win your Oscar pools, right? The shorts categories can often be the secret weapon to winning your Oscar pool, if you have a little information about the nominees and the tendencies of Oscar voters. Here’s a breakdown of this year’s nominees and which ones have the inside track to win.
BEST LIVE-ACTION SHORT
Ala Kachuu – Take and Run
The Dress
The Long Goodbye
On My Mind
Please Hold
Importance of Subject Matter: While not as dependent on Big Important Stories as the documentary shorts tend to be, recent live-action short winners have lingered on heavy topics. Please Hold, from writer-director K.D. Dávila (who just won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at Sundance for the upcoming film Emergency), is about a near-future police state where drones and touch screens shove an innocent man through the prison system without so much as ever seeing another human being.
Meanwhile, The Long Goodbye centers on an incredibly upsetting scene of a British Pakistani family being rounded up by police and masked nativist thugs, and Ala Kachuu tells the story of a young woman in Kyrgyzstan who is kidnapped for the purposes of an arranged marriage.
Heartstrings Factor: The aforementioned three films are all emotional in their own ways, and in The Dress, a little person in Poland allows herself to hope for a spark of romance amid her humdrum life, which certainly draws upon the audience’s sympathies. But of these five, the one most openly playing on viewers’ heartstrings is Danish film On My Mind, about a man whose wife is dying as he tries to record himself singing Elvis’s “Always on My Mind” to play for her.
Studio Heft: While none of the major studios or streaming platforms have a player in this category, On My Mind was distributed by The New Yorker.
Oscar History That Could Inform This Year’s Race: Last year’s winner, Two Distant Strangers, and its themes of a violent and inescapable police state are reflected in both The Long Goodbye’s unflinching look at police violence and Please Hold’s vision of the prison-industrial complex. Then there’s the fact that The Long Goodbye was cowritten by and stars 2021 best-actor nominee Riz Ahmed, and is based on Ahmed’s concept album of the same title.
Pick to Win: Of the three shorts categories, live action is always the hardest one to predict, since winners have run the gamut in terms of styles and subject matters. But Ahmed’s star power seems like it should give The Long Goodbye the edge, especially if voters are feeling similarly about it as they were Two Distant Strangers. But Please Hold works hard to entertain despite its dark subject matter, and Ala Kachuu features a strong central performance by Alina Turdumamatova, so this could be a toss-up.
Listen to Joe Reid, Katey Rich, and Richard Lawson discussing the Oscar-nominated shorts on this week‘s Little Gold Men podcast.
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BEST ANIMATED SHORT
Affairs of the Art
Bestia
Boxballet
Robin Robin
The Windshield Wiper
Importance of Subject Matter: Topicality is usually less important in the animated category, but this year’s most “important” animated short is Bestia, from Chilean filmmaker Hugo Covarrubias; it’s based on the story of Íngrid Olderöck, an officer in Augusto Pinochet’s secret police. The stop-motion animation is accentuated by the hard ceramic design on the main character, and the effect is unsettling.
Heartstrings Factor: Honestly, you’d expect more heartwarming options in the animated category, but not this year. Boxballet, which contrasts stories about a delicate ballet dancer and a brutish boxer, seems like the kind of thing that might meet at the middle to become sentimental, but it never quite goes there. Affairs of the Art, a 2D animated film from director Joanna Quinn and featuring Beryl, a recurring character from her animated films, is more bawdy than emotional (and more verbose than most nominated animated shorts, which tend to forego dialogue for mood). The most heartwarming of the five is Robin Robin, which perhaps not coincidentally feels like the most traditional of the five nominees—a fit-for-all-ages story about a robin raised by mice.
Studio Heft: Robin Robin is also the only film of the five nominees to be distributed by Netflix, which has in recent years become a dominant player in the shorts categories.
Oscar History That Could Inform This Year's Race: As if Robin Robin needed another angle of advantage, it’s also a film from Aardman Animations, the house behind Wallace and Gromit and Shaun the Sheep that has garnered eight nominations and three wins in the shorts categories (as well as four nominations and one win in features).
Pick to Win: The story on this year’s animated shorts has been about just how kid unfriendly these films are. It’s not at all unheard of for animated shorts to stray from the family fare that dominates in features, but it’s notable that four of the nominated films include violence or nudity. That could provide yet another avenue for Robin Robin to stand out. At 32 minutes, the pleasantly animated film features songs as well as the voice talents of Richard E. Grant and Gillian Anderson—it’s very nearly a feature in and of itself. All of that plus a Netflix push gives it the feel of a prohibitive favorite.
BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT
Audible
Lead Me Home
The Queen of Basketball
Three Songs for Benazir
When We Were Bullies
Importance of Subject Matter: Now here is where the big issues come to play. As is the case every year, best documentary short is giving audiences a lot to chew on: war, homelessness, bullying, equality, suicide, public policy, Title IX, ominous reminders of U.S. foreign policy, local NIMBY jerks yelling at city council meetings. It’s a veritable buffet of very serious subjects, which are conveyed to varying degrees of effectiveness in these five films.
Lead Me Home and Three Songs for Benazir stand out as the most issue-forward of the five. Lead Me Home is a street-level examination of the homelessness crisis in three West Coast cities (Seattle, San Francisco, and Los Angeles), with almost too much scope to be encompassed in a single short. Three Songs for Benazir follows a young man in Afghanistan who wants to join the military in order to fight for his country, despite his family’s objections and his obligations to his young wife.
Heartstrings Factor: Most of this year’s nominees are devastating in their own ways, though some more quietly than others. But Audible is the one most likely to make voters’ hearts soar. In telling the story of the football team at the Maryland School for the Deaf, Matthew Ogens’s film gets to know these kids and their stories—some of which are bittersweet, some tragic, some hopeful—amid some slick and beautiful filmmaking.
Studio Heft: Netflix is distributing three of this year’s nominees: Audible, Lead Me Home, and Three Songs for Benazir. A win for any one of them would give Netflix their third win in this category.
Oscar History That Could Inform This Year’s Race: The documentary categories often go to films with strong central personalities, which could be a good indicator for The Queen of Basketball, which tells the story of Lusia Harris, a women’s basketball pioneer who tells of her exploits in her own words (Harris died in January).
Pick to Win: Netflix is all in on this race, and with Audible they have a strong story with strong characters who Oscar voters will want to give awards to. For as much as the Oscars are about filmmaking craft, they’re about people too, and when voters watch Audible, it’s very easy to imagine they’ll want to send the filmmakers but also the film’s subjects up to the stage.
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March 11, 2022 at 11:11PM
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Oscars 2022: Your Guide to the Short-Film Categories - Vanity Fair
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