Rankings, for fun. Also want to say, this year's crop of animated shorts and doc short subjects were a thousand times better than last year's, especially the docs, which were super disappointing last year.
The animated program actually had a warning after the first two that the others would contain sexual content, were not appropriate for children, and that there would be a pause in action to allow families with children to leave the theater.
Oscar-Nominated Animated Shorts
1. The Windshield Wiper
2. Beast
3. Boxballet
4. Affairs of the Art
5. Robin Robin
The Windshield Wiper is probably the most ambitious of the three with its vignettes that attempt to answer "What is love?" It was certainly the most dazzling of the five, and also took the biggest swing. To absorb Beast, a tale about a broken woman with a streak of madness, I probably need to see it at least one more time. I do wonder if people read more into it than necessary because it's from Chile, a country with which the U.S. has a strange and messed up history. Robin Robin is the only one I didn't care for; cute animation, but the story is stale and the songs stink.
Oscar-Nominated Documentaries - Short Subject
1. Lead Me Home
2. Audible
3. The Queen of Basketball
4. Three Songs for Benazir
5. When We Were Bullies
I think all of these are good, but the top three by far the best. The Queen of Basketball is the crowd-pleaser of the bunch, and favorite to win the award. I love a good sports story, and we get two here, one of one of the great women's basketball players most of us would never get to know because of the absence of a professional league at her time, and the other of a great football team from a school for the deaf in Maryland. It's pretty awesome that the deaf are getting their moment, between Sound of Metal, CODA, and now this. However, Lead Me Home is both the best and most important, a doc about people without housing in L.A., San Francisco, and Seattle, their hopes and dreams, their life stories, and their daily realities. This is the one everyone in the U.S. needs to see, right now.
Benazir tells a decent story, but is underdeveloped. When We Were Bullies struggles to find its thesis, though I'll grant that it attempts to parse feelings of guilt and remorse over the past, which is destined to fail, at least in part, though I really like the editing and the use of the yearbook pictures as virtual clippings.