So anyway, my track record of correctly predicting the shorts winners would have come to a screeching halt this year.
It was an odd year for the shorts in the animated category, with four of the five being very adult in nature and one of them - "Bestia," which was based on a true story of an officer in Augusto Pinochet's secret police - being truly disturbing. To me, this was a weak crop in what is usually my favorite category of shorts. The two stand-outs were "Robin Robin" and "The Windshield Wiper." The former is the kid-friendly one, the story of a robin who believes he's a mouse. It was distributed by Netflix (a big player in shorts) and featured voices by some celebrities, so was generally considered to be the favorite, but as charming as it was, I preferred "The Windshield Wiper," one of the most gorgeously drawn shorts I've ever seen and a layered but not overwrought meditation on the nature of modern love. Similar to 2010 when one of my all-time favorite shorts, "The Lost Thing," beat the celebrity-voiced and much higher-profile "The Gruffalo," this year "The Windshield Wiper" pulled off the upset! Yay! Both "The Windshield Wiper" and "Robin Robin" are available to stream (with the former being available for free and the latter on Netflix); I don't think any of the others are.
Likewise to me, the live-action shorts weren't quite as strong this year as in years past, and in this case the winner, "The Long Goodbye," was one I did not enjoy.
As a huge fan of Riz Ahmed, I had high expectations, but a great build-up and terrific acting are ruined in this one by a jarring rant at the end that seemingly comes out of nowhere and, while I might agree with its premises (addressing Islamophobia) was ridiculously heavy-handed. I didn't expect this one to win, but perhaps the power of Ahmed and his performance propelled it. My favorites were "The Dress," a story of a little-person Polish maid who seeks a normal life of love and heartbreak, and "Ala Kachuu," a tale of kidnapping a bride for an arranged marriage in Kyrgyzstan, both of which shorts featured incredible lead actress performances.
My favorite program of shorts this year was the documentaries, with four of the five being very strong pieces that would have been deserving winners. I would have picked to win either "Lead Me Home," an understandably upsetting look at the issues of homelessness in Seattle and San Francisco, or "Audible," about the football team at the Maryland School for the Deaf. The winner, "The Queen of Basketball," is the story of Lusia Harris, who was a basketball pioneer, winning three college championships and becoming the first woman to score a basket in an Olympics as well as the first (and only) to have been drafted by an NBA team. This was actually my favorite of the documentary shorts even though I didn't predict it to win, as it's a fascinating story I knew nothing of, and "Lucy" herself is such a charming and compelling narrator of it. Highly recommend spending 20 minutes or so on this one, as well as checking out all of the other nominees except "When We Were Bullies," which I found too self-indulgent. All four of those I recommend are on Netflix or otherwise streaming; here's where you can watch the winner without any subscription:
https://www.shortoftheweek.com/2021/08/03/the-queen-of-basketball/