The various Academy Award categories for short films generally receive the least amount of attention. That is, unless unless you’re an Oscar prognosticator or have money riding on the show, in which case these nominations are a source of frustration, since very few people get to see these shorts, making the winner difficult to predict. But never fear! We have seen all the Oscar-nominated shorts, and whether you want to win your office pool or are just curious about them, we can tell you all about them.
Helium
A hospital janitor tries to assuage a terminally ill boy’s fear of death by telling him fanciful tales of a zeppelin-filled afterlife. The movie is well-made, and its heart is in the right place, but the mixture of saccharine sweetness and thanatos-minded darkness isn’t really novel. It doesn’t help that the movie never questions its protagonist’s desire to obfuscate reality in favor of pleasant fantasy. The last shot sums up this blank stab at the emotions, carrying the appearance of meaning without actually possessing any.
Grade: C
Do I Have to Take Care of Everything?
This super-brief piece (less than seven minutes in length) feels more like a YouTube lark than a proper film. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong, as a family tries to pull themselves together and make it to a wedding. It’s built as one big joke, with a setup-punchline-denouement structure. It’s an amusing enough joke, but I have no idea what would possess anyone to call it one of the best shorts of the year. This is the most eyebrow-raising nominee, for sure.
Grade: C
Just Before Losing Everything
Miriam (Léa Drucker) is preparing to take her two children and leave her abusive husband. But things get massively complicated when he unexpectedly shows up at her work just as they’re planning to depart. This is, without any semblance of a contest, the best of the bunch. It’s a mini-masterpiece of suspense, as the question of whether Miriam and her kids will get away seems up in the air, right up until the very end. Drucker is heartbreakingly frail but burning with resolve, while Denis Ménochet (AKA the farmer from the opening scene of Inglourious Basterds) brings reserved but imposing menace as the husband. The movie fits whole stories into the tiniest of details, feeling so much larger than its half hour. It also paces itself properly with a beginning, middle, and end, which so many shorts neglect to do. This is the one to root for, and to be miffed over if it doesn’t win.
Grade: A
That Wasn’t Me
Spanish aid workers in an unnamed African country are kidnapped by a warlord and subjected to torture at the hands of his child soldiers. This feels like the bastard child of Blood Diamond, with a similar sense of extreme condescension towards the Third World, masked as concern. The movie attempts to draw attention to the plight of child soldiers while taking every opportunity to depict Africans as nearly feral. And of course rape is used as a cheap source of dismay. Whether intentional or not, the message is that it is up to supernaturally forgiving white people to save a war-torn continent. All around, it’s odious.
Grade: D
The Voorman Problem
Martin Freeman plays a psychologist brought in to interview a prisoner (Tom Hollander) who claims to be God, and that he can prove it. Basically an abridged episode of The Outer Limits. Not The Twilight Zone, mind you. Twilight Zone was humanistic, while The Outer Limits was usually mean. This movie is just mean. There is a twist, though from the premise you can guess what it is, and the twist serves no philosophical point to chew over. Freeman and Hollander are fun together, at least.
2 thoughts on “The Oscar-Nominated Live Action Short Films”
Pretty much sums up how I felt about this bunch. How are four out of five either forgettable, lazy, or borderline offensive (or all three)?
This shows how rigged the short game is. The problem stems all the way back to film festival shorts programs as well.
Maybe you should stop watching short films. You’re way off the mark in your interpretations (at least of “Do I Have to do Everything?” and “The Voorman Problem”. The point of “Do I Have to do Everything?” was to show us how ridiculous we all are when we live our life stressed about trivial problems. And I disagree, the twist at the end of “The Voorman Problem” was meant to make the viewers think about what they would do if they were gods. It’s meant to further personify this idea of God having a human-like psyche.