2024 Oscar
Nominated Shorts Feb. 16-18, 21-25, 28
Speed Art Museum,
2035 South Third Street
$12 | $8 Speed and Louisville Film
Society members
www.speedmuseum.org/cinema
For the last 19 years ShortsTV and Magnolia Pictures have gathered the Academy Award-nominated short films for theatrical distribution. In a world inundated with short form video, it is a rare opportunity to sit down with a room full of strangers to be immersed in the sound design and blown up images of what are often small, intimate films.
These programs are divided into animated, live action, and documentary shorts. The strongest category this year, and most any year, are the Animated Shorts. The two other categories often echo the larger overall Oscars by sticking to safer, straight-forward films, but the animated shorts contain a wide range of creative styles, methods, and ideas. From the brothers who brought us “Napoleon Dynamite” and “Nacho Libre,” comes “Ninety Five Senses” in which an old man facing death recalls his life story through sense memory. Another old man tells the story of how he fled from Nazis and, in turn, sending a young girl on a journey of her own in the powerful “Letter to a Pig,” which combines drawing, photography, video, painting, and animation to great effect. The French film “Pachyderme’’ casts an eerie, foreboding atmosphere over childhood memories of spending summers in a dangerous place. Inspired by John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s song “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)” follows two soldiers who play chess by pigeon mail even as they live as enemies in a war zone. The most unique and exciting film to come out of all the Oscar nominated films is “Our Uniform ‘’ from Iran. Filmmaker Yegane Moghaddam projects animation onto real fabric to tell the story of her culture’s relationship with clothes. It is an instant animated classic and hard to forget, as are all these nominees.
The nominees for live action shorts are especially weak this year, though the favorite to win is a masterful work. In “The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar,” Wes Anderson’s usual panache and whimsy serves Roald Dahl well, and the film begs to be seen on the big screen, delivered from its Netflix purgatory. The other strong film in this category, “Invincible,” a personal film about 48 hours in a troubled boy’s life, owes its look and style to films like “Beach Rats” and “Aftersun,” and is equally heartbreaking. The Danish film “Knight of Fortune” is a quirky dramedy set in a morgue that looks at shared grief. While the two remaining films in the program have star power, they play like clunky, focus-group student films more than artistic achievements. “After” follows a man whose entire life is changed after a tragic event, and while David Oyelowo’s acting is excellent, the film itself feels unfinished, even by short film standards. “Red, White, and Blue” is the story of a single mom living paycheck to paycheck who is seeking an abortion. While dramatizing the details of this struggle in today’s political world is a welcome and important statement, the film itself does not live up to its artistic potential and squanders the always reliable Brittany Snow.
If the animated shorts are on the high end of the quality scale, and the live action mostly living towards the low-end, the Documentary Shorts come somewhere in the middle. The stars of all these films are worthy subjects, from the dedicated instrument repair workers in “The Last Repair Shop” to the delightful grandmas in “Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó,” the most imaginative and playful nominee in this program. Current topics are spelled out in “The ABCs of Book Banning,” and “Island in Between” has filmmaker Leo Chiang contemplating his relationship with Taiwan, China, and the U.S., while a look back at local history in “The Barber of Little Rock” shows the power of an embedded film team.
In 2014, there were 5856 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, this year there are 9799, making it a record year. But it’s a handful of folks from the industry, pulled from a branch of about 880 people, who determine what short films end up getting this sort of theatrical play outside of film festivals. And while the Oscars continue to be a big, dumb, self-congratulatory popularity contest, at least we get to see short films taken out of the film fest closet and treated like a headlining event for a couple of weeks. This writer hopes that short films about clothes, a gambler, and a couple of fun grandmas take home the statue.
