It’s time again for the Academy Award-nominated short films. And while I haven’t quite seen every nominated film, especially in the documentary category, by and large, I’ve been impressed with what’s up for the awards—there aren’t nearly as many ham-fisted attempts at being capital-I Important as there usually are, although there are still plenty of films that are telling important stories.
Each year it seems like the Academy voters just close their eyes and throw a dart to pick a winner, so, unfortunately, I won’t be able to help you with your Oscar pool. But there are a couple of films I want to highlight: First and foremost is Bill Morrison’s harrowing documentary Incident, which shows us a police shooting in Chicago and its immediate aftermath. Morrison has long been a master of assembling footage, and here he creates the entire film out of found material—police body cameras, surveillance video, CCTV, that sort of thing. The movie often plays out in split screen, even in quadrants, as we see what happened when the police shot a Black man in the street, how each present police officer reacted and rationalized their actions, and how the very angry community responded. It’s a heck of a piece of work.
The animated films are quite varied in style and tone, which is wonderful, and I’m not sure if my favorite is the sweet and playful Magic Candies, which finds a lonely Japanese boy suddenly able to talk to his couch and his dog, or Wander to Wonder, which is bizarre and surprising, following three tiny people who were once stars of a children’s television show but who have been trapped in a deteriorating room after their normal-sized human co-star has dropped dead.
And even the live action shorts, which are often the worst offenders, are plenty watchable this year, even if they don’t all feel like they’re totally Oscar-worthy.
Various parts of the Academy Award-nominated shorts program will be shown over the coming week at Wichita Public Library branches and also up at the Salina Art Center, there’s info about all of those screenings on their respective websites.
