2024 Oscar Nominated Short Films
(Not rated) ★★★★ How to prioritize which to see
Short films, “when they’re wonderful,” can be as compelling as any blockbuster, said Robert Abele in the Los Angeles Times. This year’s 15 Oscar-nominated shorts are currently appearing in theaters in three packages— live-action drama, animation, and documentary—and deserve attention. But don’t make the first of those categories your highest priority. I can recommend the Oscar frontrunner, Wes Anderson’s “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar,” which adapts a Roald Dahl tale about a philanthropic gambler and shows Anderson “at his most spiritually, inventively complete.” But that Benedict Cumberbatch–led fable can be streamed on Netflix, and the rest of the contenders, except for the Danish end-of-life comedy “Knight of Fortune,” are of uneven quality. In the stronger animation category, “Letter to a Pig” is “the one to beat,” said Odie Henderson in The Boston Globe. Tal Kantor’s 16-minute, black-and-white short depicts a Holocaust survivor recounting to a group of high schoolers how a pig saved his life. One student falls into a reverie that’s less compelling than the survival tale, but the images “have an undeniable power.” Better, but less likely to win, is “Ninety-Five Senses” (also available for free on Documentary+), a paean to our five senses delivered by an elderly man voiced by a “superb” Tim Blake Nelson. Among the documentary nominees, only “The Last Repair Shop” has “the full balance of human interest, social relevance, and aesthetic appeal that tends to make a winner,” said Ben Kenigsberg in The New York Times. The 40-minute film (also available on Hulu and Disney+) focuses on four specialists at a Los Angeles shop that repairs musical instruments for the city’s publicschool students. Their stories make a case for music, but also for repairing what’s broken when possible.