Review: This year's short-film Oscar nominees offer a strong slate, thought the animated work doesn't impress as much as usual
I have often referred to the annual compilations of the nominees in the short-film Academy Award categories as akin to Forrest Gump’s mama’s box of chocolates — in that you never know what you’re going to get — but this year, that sentiment is really true.
The variety assortment proves to be a bit of a disappointment with the animated shorts. Three of the five nominees are adults-only, with animated genitalia and — in the Chilean ceramic stop-motion work “Bestia” — a bit of off-putting animal-on-human contact. The comical British/Canadian hand-drawn “Affairs of the Art” has some funny moments, but is sometimes shrill. And “The Windshield Wiper,” an American/Spanish production, is a series of rotoscoped interludes, some of them sexual, without much resolution.
The one G-rated work in the bunch is “Robin Robin,” a delightful stop-motion work from the folks at Britain’s Aardman Studios. (I think it was a Christmas offering on one of the British TV channels; it’s available on Netflix now in the states.) It’s a charming story, rendered with wonderful tactile felt characters, of a young robin raised by a family of mice, but utterly lacking in mousy stealth. Richard E. Grant voices a preening magpie, and Gillian Anderson purrs menacingly as a cat on the robin’s scent.
If I was an Academy voter, my pick might have gone to the wordless Russian “BoxBallet,” director Anton Dyakov’s line-drawn story of a pencil-thin ballerina who finds a surprise protector in a gruff boxer. As I write this, news bulletins are arriving about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, so selecting this one as a favorite feels off in the current climate — but I don’t know whether Dyakov, as a filmmaker, should be punished for decisions made in the Kremlin.
The choices in the live-action short category are unequivocally top-drawer.
The Danish “On My Mind” is a heartwarming tragedy that starts as comedy, with a guy walking into a bar on a Tuesday morning and asking the bartender to fire up the karaoke machine so he can sing “Always on My Mind” — for reasons that will have viewers tearing up.
“The Dress,” from Poland, and the filmed-in-Kyrgyzstan “Ala Kachuu (Take and Run)” are harrowing and well-staged stories about women left at the whims of men — respectively, a four-foot-tall Polish motel maid (Anna Dzieduszycka) seeking love and a Kyrgyz student (Alina Turdumamatova) kidnapped into a forced marriage.
And the last two are incendiary takes on injustice and systemic racism. “Please Hold,” directed by K.D. Dávila (who won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award at this year’s Sundance Film Festival for the comedy-drama “Emergency”), follows a Latino man (Erick Lopez) in a slightly futuristic dystopia where he’s arrested, jailed and nearly convicted all by drones and automated machines. It would be my favorite, if not for the intensity of the British/Dutch production “The Long Goodbye,” written by its director, Aneil Karia, and its star, Riz Ahmed, in which a South Asian family’s wedding preparations are interrupted by a brutal paramilitary raid — ending with Ahmed’s character delivering a to-the-camera rap with devastating power and immediacy.
The documentary slate features two inspiring and entertaining sports stories: “Audible,” which follows members of the successful football team at the Maryland School for the Deaf; and “The Queen of Basketball,” a profile of Lusia Harris, who was probably the best women’s basketball player in the 1970s, but an era when there wasn’t much one could do with that talent after college. (She was drafted by the New Orleans Jazz, which is an interesting footnote.)
Two more films chronicle seemingly intractable problems. In “Three Songs for Benazir,” married filmmakers Elizabeth and Gulistan Mirzaei follow a newly married couple living in a camp for displaced people in Afghanistan, as youthful hope curdles into something else. And in “Lead Me Home,” filmmakers Pedro Kos (“Rebel Hearts”) and Jon Shenk (“Truth to Power: An Inconvenient Sequel”) capture life among those experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle — finding touching individual stories and tragic common threads.
My favorite among the documentaries is the most inward-looking, Jay Rosenblatt’s “When We Were Bullies,” in which the director revisits his old elementary school in Brooklyn — and reunites with another old classmate to examine a bullying incident from 50 years earlier. Rosenblatt’s narrative never goes where you expect, and raises intriguing questions about memory, guilt and complicity.
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Oscar-nominated animated shorts
★★★
Opens Friday, February 25, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, though probably R for animated full-frontal nudity, strong sexuality and some violence in some of the films. Running time: 97 minutes; two of the films are in Spanish, with subtitles.
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Oscar-nominated live-action shorts
★★★1/2
Opens Friday, February 25, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, though probably R for violence and some sexuality in some of the films. Running time: 125 minutes; one film is in Danish, another in Polish, and a third in Kyrgyz, with subtitles.
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Oscar-nominated documentary shorts
★★★1/2
Opens Friday, March 4, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, though probably PG-13 for suggestions of violence and substance abuse, and discussions of suicide in some of the films. Running time: 160 minutes; one film is in American Sign Language, another in Pashtu and Dari, with subtitles.