2023 Oscar-Nominated Shorts

The 2023 shorts were the best I’ve seen in years, but you would not know that from the winners, so I felt I needed to weigh in and explain what the Academy overlooked.

First off, we were thrilled to get to see them in a real theater again. Second off, it was crazy hard to figure out how and where to see them so that we could do dinner afterwards; we eventually and delightedly took the day off and saw them with Sarah in Philly at the Landmark Ritz, which was wonderful on so many counts.

We saw the live action shorts first. For the last few years, this program has left me feeling drained, deadened, depressed, and utterly dejected. Guns. Drums. Toxic men. Wars. Barriers. Betrayals. Soldiers. Violence. Hatred. But not this year. This year, the films were…lighter somehow, softer, more humane, more affecting. That isn’t to say that they weren’t, several of them, quite sad. Two revolved around death, one around wartime deprivation. But a couple dipped into or ended up in cockeyed lunacy, and most ended on a hopeful note. All were about outsiders, and four were about girls or women.  Which made for a very very nice change after years of grim, grungy testosterone-fueled conflicts in these live short programs. (But trust the Academy to award the Oscar to the sole short featuring a male protagonist!).

All five shorts take their lead character on a journey to deeper understanding of themselves, their fellows, and their world. By the end of the harrowing, haunting The Red Suitcase, the heroine has lost everything that gave her identity; her first steps down this road were of her own volition: she removed her hajib. Will she continue to have agency? We care about her; she is a little girl in a frightening and unfamiliar land. When I first saw it, I worried for her; now, maybe I feel hope.

An Irish Goodbye leaves the viewer much less ambiguously hopeful. The mother is dead and the estranged stubborn brothers, one who has Downs Syndrome and the other who has left for a life in the city, have come together in meticulously carrying out a presumed bucket list in her honor. There is dark humor and whimsy, but it is a little too neat for my taste.

Far from neat and verging on downright weird is the Italian Disney film Le Pupille, which features scary strict nuns, a blowsy Italian voluptuary, girl orphans who pray for petitioners for a fee on Christmas morning while suspended in midair, and a cake made from seventy eggs at a point in World War II when I don’t think there were that many eggs in all of Italy.

A strange tale indeed! And totally inverted, with the pious denying and begrudging, the innocent decried as bad and selfish (Sarah astutely noted that the stubborn Serafina shares her ill-gotten slice with first the dogs and then the children, more like Christ than the calculating Mother Superior), and a flippant, irreverent, amoral Italian shrug of an ending with cake—albeit on the pavement—for all.

Night Ride is also a rollercoaster of tones and tempos, with its moods changing as the heroine, a little person who is early for the night train, accidentally at first, but then gradually less cautiously and more assuredly and more bravely and smartly, takes matters into her own hands. I won’t spoil it, as it’s available in full to watch.

The last of the five, Ivalu, set in Greenland, is about a little girl’s love for her missing older sister and her journey to discover what became of her. The answer to the mystery is not in any of the stark, pristine, forbidding but majestic mountains or caves or waters she encounters as she treks through the places where she and Ivalu played; the answer is at home where the dark deeds that led Ivalu to her eventual resting place occurred.

Interestingly, the Inuit tale of the sea goddess Sedna that underscores Ivalu was the subject of the best of the pieces at this year’s Puppet Slam at La MaMa, Katherine Fahey’s “crankie” retelling of this scary-sad-savage myth which, nonetheless, also ends on a note of hope: the angry Sedna and her stormy seas can be placated by combing her hair, smoothing out all the debris it has accumulated and making it, her, the sea, and the world calm again.

Now to the animations. Two are sublime, transcendent. One is wise and funny, sassy and brassy. One is quirky weird. And one is abysmal, wretchedly inauthentic, hackneyed, cloying, and pointless. That one won the award.

Since all of these are available to watch online, I will not belabor them; they all (except the repugnant The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse) should be seen and savored. Let me first dismiss the execrable entry. I understand that it is a children’s book, and I will do my damnedest to keep it out of the hands of any children I know. What struck me first on viewing The Boy… is how derivative it is. The animation style echoes E.H. Shepard’s Winnie-The-Pooh illustrations. The boy’s quest, to return home, echoes Dorothy’s. The rhythm of the noun-packed title echoes The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The three magical friends (all male) mimic at least the outward composition of Dorothy’s own original confreres, but their needs are vaguer and more neurotic. And lastly, the closing tableau of the blond-haired boy and his three friends framed by a deep blue night sky shot with stars echoes Le Petit Prince. It is a charmless film made by clumsy cut-and-paste or soulless AI. In chopping up all the winner bits, it forgot to give it any heart. Instead, the long short is peppered with the most anodyne dialogue of the we-are-all-special variety: Sarah and I were dangerously close to a serious attack of the giggles and could not look at each other for much of the movie.

Washing the taste of all that treacle away was the frank, sly, funny My Year of Dicks. Sarah thinks this should be required viewing for all teenage girls, as it recounts the heroine’s quest to lose her virginity and her heart. She loses the latter at least, along with her head, in a very funny series of differently styled vignettes of romance and passion as filtered through a gawky adolescent’s imagination. It is charming.

An Ostrich Told Me the World Is Fake and I Think I Believe It is a highly meta short that reminded me of nothing so much as the odd half-world of Severance. A rather grim piece, when you think about it, saved from despair by its black humor.

Now to the pieces that soar: literally and figuratively. The Flying Sailor is nothing short of breathtaking. And, for the least grounded of the shorts, it is oddly the one based on fact. Apparently, in 1917 in Halifax Harbor, two ships bringing supplies to the war collided: one was loaded with munitions and the explosion was horrific. Thousands were killed or injured, but one sailor flew over a mile in the air and landed unharmed. This short traces his journey: it goes far far far more than a mile. Staggering and wordless and beautiful.

Ice Merchants is also wordless. A father and son live a precarious but happy life on the side of a mountain cliff. Something has gone from their lives and we know who she is and how she is missed by an exquisite use of color. Changing climate dooms their livelihood: there is no longer any ice to sell, and the foundations of their lives, already shaken, are rocked to the core. Watch.