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Jake’s Big Ass Oscar Rundown, Part 1: The Shorts

Jake Brooks

The Oscars are upon us and with them comes the age-old pastime: trying to predict the winners. Why me? The guy who has written only one review of a middling late-period Clint Eastwood film for this site? Because I have been scrambling around like an idiot spending too much money to see almost all of the nominees. Don’t believe me? I HAVE SEEN THE SHORT FILMS! Have you? Didn’t think so! It’s something I’ve done a handful of times before which leads me to an embarrassing confession for an Oscar prognosticator: I have no clue how they pick winners. Most Oscar categories have a sort of pattern and previous award shows to indicate who will win. I’m pretty much lost as to how they pick these. So all I got is my opinions, for whatever they are worth.

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT Black Sheep End Game Lifeboat A Night at the Garden Period. End of Sentence.

Black Sheep features an interview with a Nigerian British man recalling his childhood moving from metropolitan multicultural London to the smaller all-white town Essex. His story is re-enacted by actors. End Game (which you can watch on Netflix) is about end-of-life care in San Francisco. Lifeboat follows Sea Watch, an organization that rescues refugees stuck in the Mediterranean trying to go from Africa to Europe. A Night at the Garden is simply edited and scored vintage footage of an American Nazi rally (or “Pro-America” as it’s called) that PACKED Madison Square Garden in 1939. Period. End of Sentence. is about women in India who produce low-cost but super effected sanitary pads in a country where menstruation is not openly discussed. (Get it? The title is a pun!)

Watching Madison Square Garden packed with wannabe Nazis is a chilling thing (pre-World War II, a LOT of Americans didn’t see anything wrong with Hitler’s ideals), especially given the current political climate, but A Night at the Garden is in the end just edited archival footage with some Reznor-esque ominous tones for score. It’s simplicity is affecting but up against four well-made films, it doesn’t get my vote. Lifeboat didn’t hit me as emotionally as I feel it should have but I am fully aware that four films in, I was getting a bit fatigued by intense subject matter. No disrespect to the film-makers or the amazing humanitarians documented but it didn’t connect with me. Black Sheep depicted a cultural issue through the lens of the intensely personal. Instead of making a wide-ranging film about racism in Britain it focuses solely on Cornelius Walker’s experiences. Walker is a tremendously compelling interview. His narration gives the film its power, but with all due credit to the cast I did not care for the re-enactments. It gives a powerful moment at the end where Walker stares down Kai Francis Lewis, the actor who portrays him as a teen, but I wasn’t as enamored with the storytelling structure.

I will say the most pleasant surprise was Period. End of Sentence. After dealing with subjects of racism, death, full-blown Naziism, and refugees, ShortsTV (the organization that sends the nominees to theaters around the country) wisely scheduled the only real happy film to be last. It begins with the social problem: India’s taboo of talking about menstruation (you know, that thing that literally every cisgendered woman does for decades of her life) and the resulting lack of available sanitary products to the less affluent women there. But it then shows us how women are making it better. Whether you see the documentary or not, you can help at thepadproject.org so give that a shot!

The film that affected me most was End Game. It is about end-of-life care, something a whole lot of us will have to deal with someday. We meet several people facing terminal illness. One of them dies during the course of the film, and (as it filmed some time ago) the epilogue informs us that all have since passed (I do not consider this a spoiler for a movie about dying people). We get to know the doctors including Dr. B.J. Miller, a triple amputee who had his own brush with death. We get to see a zen hospice care center in San Francisco that tries to help people face the end with a sense of spiritual wellness. It’s all very moving and brought tears to my eyes. It’s sort of a cliché to say “death is a part of life” but if we have to be reminded of that, I’d prefer it to be as moving as this film.

Jake’s Pick: End Game BEST ANIMATED SHORT Animal Behaviour Bao Late Afternoon One Small Step Weekends

Animal Behaviour is about a gorilla, a cat, a leech, a pig, a bird, and praying mantis in group therapy with a dog psychiatrist. It is from Canada, hence the “u” in “behaviour.” Hey, a lot of you have probably seen Bao, as it played before Incredibles 2. Good for you! It’s Pixar’s heartwarming tale of a woman who raises the titular Chinese food as a son. Late Afternoon hails from Ireland and is about an elderly woman in the grips of Alzheimer’s revisiting memories prompted by her surroundings. One Small Step is the story of a girl who wants to be an astronaut and her cobbler father who supports her dream. Weekends is the story of a child of divorce who spends his weekends with his dad (who is always listening to “Money for Nothing” by Dire Straits).

Weekends was probably the weakest for me (hey, that was almost a pun). The animation was cool and I am all about Dire Straits but I didn’t connect with emotional core of the story. Maybe that’s on me as I’m not a child of divorce. By contrast, Late Afternoon had me weeping as I lost a grandmother to Alzheimer’s and therefore take that subject matter rather hard. But without that personal connection on my part, I don’t think it was one of the better ones. Animal Behaviour is pretty funny. It was good writing and clever sight gags. Bao is a universal story of motherhood told through allegory with a cultural specificity that makes it very satisfying. But my favorite of the bunch seems to have out-Pixared Pixar. One Small Step tells a story spanning many years that encapsulates hopes, dreams, familial love, and just all that sentiment that I’m a big old sucker for.

Jake’s Pick: One Small Step BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT Detainment Fauve Marguerite Mother Skin

Detainment is the horrific true story of two Irish children who killed a third, as told through their actual police interviews. Fauve (which Google Translate tells me is French for “Wildcat”) is about two kids prancing each other when they stumble on a quarry. Marguerite is about an old woman intrigued by the lifestyle of her nurse. Mother is a tense, mostly one shot, movie about a divorced woman who gets a call from her young son and learns that he is alone in an unknown location. The rather controversial Skin is about a neo-Nazi raising his young son, committing a hate crime, and… well, I can’t spoil the end but… damn. (I read one review that says the movie withholds the main character’s prejudice until the hate crime but he has a visible SS tattoo in his first scene so I think that critic was just unobservant. Suck it, NPR. [Not really; I love you.])

These movies bummed me the hell out. A film juxtaposing childhood with death (or the imminent threat thereof) is fine but Jesus, four of them? This may count as a spoiler but these film have children dying, children killing, and in one case both. Marguerite is the lone exception and that is about a very old woman who is sick and therefore, implicitly, will die soon. It’s a beautiful meditation on end-of-life regret, but still. So death is all around. Most of the films are some degree of good (Fauve didn’t really do it for me) but none of them are pleasant. I do not need movies to be happy-go-lucky by any means but watching five downers in a row is trying.

Detainment is very high drama but the true crime, while interesting, doesn’t feel quite brought to life the way someone like David Fincher does in Zodiac or on Mindhunter. Also folks in the UK are PISSED about this movie. It doesn’t seem overly sensationalized, but the victim’s mother was not consulted and is still upset. Skin won me over with its ending (and it’s hard to talk about this flick without spoilers) but the first third of it is just Nazis having a good time, which is probably why people hate it so much. But early on even I was wondering “what is the point of this?” Then the movie… well… got to its point. Director Guy Nattiv has made a feature length film called Skin about neo-Nazis but it is not the same story as the short, which raises questions for me because the point of the short is that ending. The film that I initially got upset with but just like more and more the more I think about is Mother (or Madre in its original Spanish if you don’t want to confuse it with Darren Aronofsky’s exclamation-pointed fever dream). The actress Marta Nieto carries this tense thriller with just a woman on the phone. Her son Iván is alone on a beach somewhere, probably in France. Iván’s dad went to get something and hasn’t come back. Iván calls his mother on his dad’s cell phone and the movie is about an absolutely powerless woman being confronted with the ultimate parental nightmare. It’s intense and my biggest problem with it is that it ends. Luckily, the internet tells me director Rodrigo Sorogoyen will be expanding it to a feature. If he’s smart he will just reuse this entire film as a key scene. Nieto’s intensity makes it work.

Jake’s Pick: Mother Well, that’s round one. The Big Ass Oscar Rundown shall return with my thoughts on the nominated foreign, animated, and documentary films as well as a quick take on the musical categories. Stay tuned…

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