Hereâs which of this yearâs Oscar nominated shorts are worth seeing

Every year itâs a given that Oscar fatigue from an aggressively hyped season can be wonderfully remedied by the pleasures of discovering the less-publicized â and usually more diverse â nominated shorts.
This yearâs documentary category boasts a pair of sports-themed standouts. Ben Proudfootâs âThe Queen of Basketballâ is a joyous portrait of college legend, breakthrough Olympian, and only ever female NBA draftee Lusia âLucyâ Harris, a gifted athlete without a professional league of her own. Harris died in January, but here sheâs a wry chronicler of her underappreciated majesty, making âQueenâ a fitting film obituary. Matt Ogensâ percussively energized, heartfelt âAudibleâ takes us into the tightknit huddle of high schoolers in the successful football program at the Maryland School for the Deaf, their Big Game preparation a poignant metaphor for the feelings of pride, loss and community that make them different from, but also no different than, any teenager facing an uncertain world.
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What the future holds, meanwhile, for young Afghan husband and father Shaista, living in a Kabul displacement camp and hoping to join his countryâs army, is at the center of Elizabeth and Gulistan Mirzaeiâs humanely drawn portrait of constrained options, âThree Songs for Benazir.â Looking back on a childhood choice (and seizing on a wild coincidence) is the province of veteran experimental filmmaker Jay Rosenblattâs âWhen We Were Bullies,â a wonderfully intimate, collage-styled reckoning with memory, hurt and the ethics of storytelling.
The least of these is Pedro Kosâ and Jon Shenkâs gratingly slick snapshot of Los Angeles/Bay Area/Seattle homelessness, âLead Me Home,â in which excessive, obnoxiously pretty drone shots and cloying music distance us from grasping a pressing concern.
Issues take precedence in the live-action category, too, to varying success. Maria Brendleâs blunt âAla Kachuu â Take and Run,â set in Kyrgyzstan, depicts a young womanâs kidnapping and coerced marriage, against her wishes to go to college, as a terrifying ritual of upholding village tradition. It makes its point but has no ambition or interest in filmmaking beyond that. Conversely, Polish director Tadeusz Lysiakâs âThe Dressâ initially shows the chain-smoking, cynical loneliness of truck stop hotel maid Julka (a magnetic Anna Dzieduszycka) with an affecting realism, until a crudely pitying swerve undoes what had promised to be a powerful exploration of a disabled womanâs sexuality.

The nerviest conscience buster is Aneil Kariaâs âThe Long Goodbye,â a companion film to actor/rapper Riz Ahmedâs same-named album. He plays one of many members of a large British-South Asian family in a bustling house preparing for a wedding until a violent reality intrudes, leading to a wall-breaking rap about race, history and nationalism that Ahmed delivers like a frontline soliloquy. On the more âBlack Mirrorâ end of things is KD Davilaâs Kafkaesque satire âPlease Hold,â which fuses our blind fascination with all things contactless, online and privatized with our inability to reform a byzantine justice system, following it to a not-too-far-off conclusion for someone like innocent Latino 20-something Mateo (Erick Lopez).
And off in its own eccentric, sentimental corner is the Danish entry âOn My Mindâ from previous live-action short Oscar winner Martin Strange-Hansen â itâs an uneven tale of grief, belief and daytime karaoke with maybe more heart than charm.
Of course, the feels often rule the animation category, but this is a rare year in which enchantment titan Disney/Pixar isnât in the mix, and itâs great to see that allow for a few more adult titles that eschew adorability for, well, anything else. The one major-brand offering aimed at kiddos â three-time category winner Aardman Animationâs âRobin Robin,â from co-directors Dan Ojari and Mikey Please â feels a little storybook-generic as it weaves cute creatures, star voices (Richard E. Grant, Gillian Anderson) and childlike songs to tell the Rankin-Bass-adjacent tale of a robin raised by a family of mice. Itâs perfectly pleasant.

Lives marred by cruelty factor into the hand-drawn âBoxballetâ and stop-motion âBestia.â The former, from Anton Dyakov, brings together a hulking, banged-up pugilist and an up-and-coming ballerina for a wordless-but-not-soundless meeting of sensitive souls. The latter is Chilean animator Hugo Covarrubiasâ slow-burning, textural glimpse â set during the countryâs military dictatorship â of the corrosive duality in a policewomanâs daily life with her dog, her body and her demons. The eerie airlessness of the dollhouse-like settings and the porcelain shine on the puppets are memorably unsettling.
Influential designer/animator Alberto Mielgo, who sparked the aesthetic of âInto the Spider-Verse,â is another wizard with texture and visual depth. His meditative âThe Windshield Wiperâ poses the question âWhat is love?â to a man in a cafĂ©, then seeks clues in a series of vignettes with couples around the world. Mielgoâs urbanized hybrid of the painterly and the digitized is hypnotic and its own example of an artistâs love.

British animator Joanna Quinnâs enthusiasm for the wiggly expressiveness of traditional animation, meanwhile, makes her latest romp starring middle-aged feminist factory worker Beryl, âAffairs of the Art,â a raucous delight. (The last Beryl short was in 2006.) Now hellbent on becoming a âhyperfuturist artiste,â drawing-obsessed Beryl (voiced as ever by Menna Trussler) relays a family history of sibling rivalry, imperiled pets, morbid curiosities and eccentric tastes, while Quinnâs masterful caricatures and love of bulbous bodies in motion would make Da Vinci blush, laugh and be jealous simultaneously. Drawing becomes riotously, beautifully alive in Quinnâs vaudeville of aging and anatomy, but so does the wonderfully personal message delivered through her never-too-late-to-try heroine: Thereâs power in passion, whenever it strikes you in life. Donât sell it â ahem â short.
'2022 Oscar Nominated Short Films'
Not rated
Running times: 2 hours, 1 minute (live action); 1 hour, 37 minutes (animation); 2 hours, 39 minutes (documentary)
Playing: In general release
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