Short of the Week
Another fun awards season has wrapped! Congrats to the teams behind all the nominated films, but here are the winners of the Best Animated Short Film, Best Documentary Short Film, and Best Live-Action Short Film categories at the 96th Academy Awards:
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Best Animated Short Film
Winner: War is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko directed by Dave Mullins
Rob thought, in our Oscar Predictions post, that an anti-war film would find appeal within the Academy membership and he was proven right. Several factors worked to the War is Over! team’s benefit over the campaign—the film launches ElectroLeague, a new, real-time animation studio, giving the team a strong financial incentive to campaign hard. Then, the hi-profile collaboration with the Lennon family dwarfed the star power at hand to any of its competitors in the category, generating a lot of easy trade press. Finally, director Dave Mullins’ familiarity with the Oscar process and association with the critical animation studio bloc, surely provided a boost, as the director was nominated for his Disney-Pixar short, Lou, in 2018
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Best Documentary Short Film
Winner: The Last Repair Shop Directed by Kris Bowers & Ben Proudfoot
We warned you not to overlook 3-time nominee Ben Proudfoot in our prediction post and it looks like we should have taken our own advice! Congrats to Kris and Ben on their 1st win as a duo, coming off their previous nomination for A Concerto is a Conversation and Proudfoot’s previous solo win for The Queen of Basketball. Via his Breakwater Studios, Proudfoot has become a standard-bearer for the short form, and with The Last Repair Shop, he and Kris work on their largest canvas yet at nearly 40min. It’s an achievement that they can take many of the same dynamics that work in their shorter profiles and stitch them together into a larger whole, making for a moving and inspirational documentary. From a campaign side, this was one of the more creative in recent memory, and the Los Angeles Unified School District students and alumni served as great feel-good ambassadors for the project.
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Best Live-Action Short Film
Winner: The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar directed by Wes Anderson
Many people find the narration to be over-the-top and relentless, but many people are also just Wes-haters. We’ve always found Anderson’s blending of the literary, theatrical, and cinematic disciplines here to be legitimately fantastic, and the Academy has chosen to agree. Certainly, the profile of the project placed it at a massive advantage over its competitors, but choosing to honor Anderson with his first Oscar out of 8 tries was not laziness, but meritocratic. At first, we were a bit offended that he did not show up to accept the award, but word that the filmmaker is currently kicking off a new production in Germany is an exciting excuse.