'World of Tomorrow, ' 'Claude Lanzmann: Spectres of the Shoah' and 'Day One' Courtesy of Sundance Film Festival; Courtesy of HBO; Courtesy of 2016 Oscar® Nominated Short Films/SHORTS HD
THR's awards analyst offers his take on the prospects for each of this year's animated short, documentary short and live action short nominees.
Oscar pools can be won or lost on the shorts categories. There are three of them: best animated short, best documentary short and best live action short. Few people, in or out of the Academy, watch all five nominees in these categories. This is not for lack of effort on the part of the Academy, which sends copies to every member, or Shorts HD, which distributes them in select art-house theaters. It's just that most people have limited time and/or desire to see films about which they know little in advance.
So how does one predict winners in these categories? One has to know what is likeliest to appeal to the people who do watch the shorts, based on past history. And one has to know what is likeliest to appeal to the people who don't watch the shorts but decide to vote for something anyway, of which I assure you there are more than a few.
Here is my humble attempt at breaking down the prospects of this year's candidates. Feel free to share your thoughts/disagreements in the comments section at the bottom of the post.
BEST ANIMATED SHORT
Prologue is the slightest of the nominees, running less than six minutes, and it's surrealistic, dialogue-free and includes a sequence of gruesome violence, so I have a hard time seeing it winning. And We Can't Live Without Cosmos, the story of two lifelong friends who work for a NASA-like institution and are then separated, tugs at the heart, but is animated in a fairly humdrum style. So my suspicion is that the winner will be one of the other three nominees, Bear Story, World of Tomorrow or Disney-Pixar's Sanjay's Super Team.
In all but three years in the 21st century, a Disney or Pixar short has been nominated in this category. This has happened for a few reasons: because those two companies — one since 2006 — have employed tremendously talented people; because Pixar and now Disney-Pixar shorts are screened in front of widely seen features; and because the Academy is now packed with employees of Disney-Pixar, since people who are nominated for or win an Oscar are generally invited to join the Academy the following year, and then tend to vote for the work of their employer. ("You'd have to be a ninny" not to, Joan Crawford once said, back in the days when actors, too, were under contract to a specific studio.) This doesn't guarantee a win for a Disney-Pixar short — Presto (2008), Day & Night (2010) and La Luna (2011) all came up short — but it certainly provides a built-in advantage.
This year's Disney-Pixar nominee, Sanjay's Super Team, depicts the story of an Indian boy — its director, Sanjay Patel — and his father learning to understand each other. It unfolds, without dialogue, in a bit more of a surrealistic way than most of Disney-Pixar's past shorts; at the same time, it's an example of beautiful computer-graphic animation, and brings some diversity in a year in which the Oscar nominations are lacking it. Still, I think the other two nominees are stronger films and will be regarded as such by voters who have seen more than just one nominee. The question is how many will have done so.
Bear Story is a tale about an anthropomorphic bear who, we learn, was cruelly separated from his family and forced to perform in a circus. Also dialogue-free, it's intricately animated and deeply moving, especially for animal lovers, so I could see it winning. But my pick is the category's sole nominee that does feature dialogue, Don Hertzfeldt's World of Tomorrow, which won the Grand Jury Prize for short films at last year's Sundance Film Festival and, unlike any of the other nominees, is currently available on Netflix. It blends a variety of forms of animation, from stick drawings to far more complex art, to tell an engaging sci-fi story about a little girl who meets her future self. It's darkly funny, thought-provoking (raising all sorts of questions about technological progress coming at the price of social disintegration) and in some respects reminds me of this category's winner from two years ago, Mr. Hublot.
My pick: World of Tomorrow
BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT
All five nominees in this category recount very powerful stories. Two will leave voters upset and three will inspire them, and I think those in the latter camp stand a better shot at prevailing than those in the former.
I have a hard time seeing voters getting behind Last Day of Freedom. Its narrator is a very likable and sympathetic figure who, for very personal reasons, opposes the death penalty; many voters may agree with that stance, but be turned off by other aspects of the film, not least of all the fact that it's animated and leaves one with little to take away from it except a sense of sadness.
A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, which HBO is distributing, is another one that leaves viewers wanting to blow their brains out. It recounts the horrifying story of a young Pakistani woman who survives an honor killing attempt by her father and uncle, who felt dishonored when she eloped to marry a man from a lower social class — and who then forgives them because the elders in her community and the elder in her husband's family ask her to do so. While the film offers a fascinating look into the thought process and inner-workings of a medieval patriarchal society, and has apparently shamed some Pakistani leaders into publicly repudiating the practice of honor killings, the "resolution" of the situation is one that leaves those of us from the Western world with a sense of hopelessness about ever being able to bridge the gap with those who are not.
