Oscar Short Reaction

For the second year in a row, I tracked down the Oscar nominees for Animated and Live-Action Short. I'll be coming out with their chances at the Oscars shortly. Before I do that, I want to give a quick reflection on them. I've gone ahead and ranked the shorts from what I enjoyed the most to the least.

Live-Action

Timecode
Two security guards bond over a love of dance on the job.
This is just delightful. It's a two-hander with very little dialogue. Many of the other shorts are depressing. This one isn't at all. It's a sweet story. The dance sequences in the climax are charming and the last line is perfect.

Sing
A grade school choir teacher tries to win a competition by getting the bad singers to mime singing.
The beginning and middle are all overly familiar. That ending is so perfect though, that it makes up for everything else.

Silent Nights
A Danish woman volunteering at the Salvation Army falls in love with a Ghanaian refugee.
I really liked the relationship at the center of the film. It also does fine work showing the shit that immigrants have to put up with sometimes. There were too many rough edges to ignore though.

La Femme et le TGV
An older woman bonds with the engineer of a train that passes by her house every day.
A lot of this year's nominees felt very familiar, like I was watching 30-minutes-or-less versions of movies I'd seen before; none more than this one. This was both too long and too short if that makes any sense. There wasn't enough story to make it any longer, but I needed more time to buy into the repetition of her life. I wasn't as impressed with the fact that it was based on actual events as the movie wanted me to be.

Ennemis Interieurs
An Algerian man is interrogated by French police while applying for citizenship.
This reminded me a lot of the HBO movie Strip Search. Perhaps it's timely in France, but this story felt dated by 15 years to my American eyes. And it wasn't distinctly directed enough to leave an impression otherwise.

Animated

Borrowed Time
An old sheriff reflects on an accident from his youth.
I love how efficient these animated shorts are. This is visually pretty traditional but it looked great. The story is simple and sad. Nothing hit me like We Can't Live Without Cosmos last year.

Piper
A bird gets over his fear of the ocean.
I saw this one already (before Finding Dory). It's sweet. The "I've seen some shit you wouldn't believe" look of the bird after the first disastrous experience with the tide gets me every time. It's the most beautiful of the shorts.

Pearl
The story of a father and daughter as told from the passenger side seat in their old car.
The animation was nice. This is the first VR film to be nominated by the Oscars. It also tells an efficient story. I would've been more impressed if it abandoned the conceit (the passenger side perspective) less.

Pear Cider and Cigarettes
A narrator reflects on the story of his hard-living friend Techno.
I like local fable storytelling normally. This reminded me of hearing about the Swede in American Pastoral at the beginning. Once it got to the adventures in China this really dragged. I started to feel like I was watching part 12 of a collection of short films with this narrator and I was missing out on something. The soundtrack has moments that drip with cool. It has just as many moments when the soundtrack gets in the way. Especially compared to the efficiency of the other shorts, this felt very undisciplined.

Blind Vaysha
The story of a woman who sees the future in one eye and the past in the other.
Too much exposition. It was all narration and didn't go anywhere. I get the point it's trying to make, but I'd like a little visual story-telling along the way. It had a distinctive look though. I'll give it that.

(Like last year, there were a few other "Highly Recommended" shorts shown to fill the time. I won't be covering them, however, they were fine)