Lists Galore! 📜

The 96th Academy Awards® Shortlist Collection

45 films learned that they would be progressing in their hope of winning a statue of a little gold man. It’s a fascinating selection and our collection on Shortverse is the best way to explore the shortlists. Use filters to separate by the categories: Live-Action, Animation, and Documentary. But, want to know how many are from the UK? Or which ones are streaming right now? Filters are your friend, as 16 films are currently available to watch (some on paid services) and we’ve got trailers for most of the rest.

In the immediate aftermath, here are some quick impressions of mine:

• Two 800-pound Gorillas in Live-Action: celebrated feature film auteurs Wes Anderson and Pedro Almodóvar both progress and will dominate coverage of the category. This hasn’t been fait accompli in the past—the likes of Yorgos Lanthimos and indeed Almodóvar himself have made shorts in recent years that have failed to win. However, neither had Netflix in their corner, and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar must be considered a prohibitive favorite.

• Big-Name Directors: The other categories are stacked with big-name directors too: Ramin Bahrani, Kevin MacDonald, and multi-time nominee, Ben Proudfoot, in Documentary (to say nothing of the directing debut of legendary executive, Sheila Nevins). Even animation has a film by Napoleon Dynamite himself, Jared Hess.

• Festival Favorites Do Well: Oscar has, in years past, been something of a quixotic crapshoot, and while the Live-Action category still raises eyebrows for some of its inclusions, changes in the voting membership in recent years mean that more festival heavyweights are making it through. A Kind of Testament and 27 have dominated international festivals this year, with splashy premieres at non-animation events like the Berlinale and Cannes respectively, and Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó cleaned up in the USA, winning Grand Jury or Best Documentary at SXSW, AFI Fest, and Seattle International.

• Is Streamer Dominance Fading? Streamers are well-represented—by my informal count Netflix has 3, Paramount+ has 2, Disney+ has a couple. But, it doesn’t feel like the swell of prior years. I’m probably just misremembering though, as there will certainly be a rush of acquisitions leading up to, and after, the nominee announcement at the end of January.

• Shouts to S/W Alums: Pleased as punch for Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers, Sean Wang, Elham Ehsas, Ramin Bahrani, Stéphanie Clément, and sure, even Wes Anderson.

📅 This Week on Short of the Week

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In the spirit of the list-making season, Short of the Week supplies an entry with a special twist. Our official Short Awards will drop in February, so we pointedly instructed our team to come up with a short that wasn’t necessarily the best film from our 2023 coverage, but instead their favorite—the one that stuck with them and that they will revisit the most. See what your favorite writer chose!

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Canada’s reigning top short after winning the Canadian Screen Awards, Aziz Zoromba’s family drama is impeccable filmmaking about an immigrant family that must come together amid crisis. Despite working with seemingly mundane elements, the strength and specificity of its character portraits are a highlight and Céline calls it an “enthralling narrative.”

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A “tightly-packed” and “darkly funny” short from Georgia Goggin, BEND is not your usual sexual consent drama. Serafima, in her sharp review, calls it a “cleverly manoeuvred story of transformation, from victimhood to vigilantism” as Goggin, inspired by hers and the stories of millions of other women, uses filmmaking to “rewrite the ending of her own sexual harassment story.”

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Billed as a “tribute to ‘the most neglected heroes of today’, Black mothers”, Abdou Cissé has crafted a film with laugh-out-loud highs, but with also surprising emotion and sincerity. A fan-favorite on the festival circuit, the film recently grabbed the BIFA for Best British Short.

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Famous for his music videos and, more recently, his VFX work on Everything Everywhere All At Once, Ben Brewer was an artist we admired well before 2023. However, we were unprepared and instantly smitten by A Folded Ocean, his wild relationship metaphor, out of its Sundance 2023 premiere. In the high-concept short, Brewer takes the romantic adage ”two become one”, quite literally. Céline notes that the film “cleverly uses an absurd premise to explore a relationship drama with real poignancy.”

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An exquisite short doc full of cultural specificity, this 18-minute doc offers a solemn tribute to a fading cultural heritage and a vital documentation of a mode of communication that teeters on the brink of extinction.

Short Film Conference - “Short of the Year”

So The Academy weighed in with their picks, our Short of the Week team highlighted personal favorites from our online curation, but we’ve got one more list for you! Short Film Conference is a non-profit org whose mission is to unite the global short film community. Since 1970, it has functioned as a network for short film professionals with a conference at Clermont-Ferrand each year (where I was invited to give a talk in 2018).

Since 2016 it has also given out a “Short of the Year” award voted on by its membership. Let’s be honest—shorts still feel like they are sitting at the kid’s table when it comes to the Oscars or BAFTAs or Césars, but this is the closest we have to a prize for shorts from the short film industry itself.

Anyway, yesterday was the “shortest day” in the Northern Hemisphere, so the SFC dropped their list of 15 films in the running for “Short of the Year” on their Instagram, & we’ve got a Shortverse collection for you to scope out below!