As some of you know, the highlight of my movie-watching year is to see the Oscar-nominated shorts. Last year, due to COVID I wasn't able to get out and see these and didn't figure out where to watch them. This year, my local art-house theater, which is still closed but where I've remained a member, had a special deal on streaming them. Score!
So far I've only watched two sets, with the live-action shorts to come tomorrow.
Animated: These are usually my favorites, but this year's crop was really disappointing. My favorite was the French abstract/symbolist-style "Genius Loci." It was gorgeous, but I didn't really understand what was happening until maybe halfway through, when I realized it was a woman's journey through her past and an existential crisis. Or at least I think so. I'm still not sure. The others were cute but insubstantial ("Burrow" and "Yes People"), an exercise in show-off animation ("Opera"), or an overly manipulative attempt at garnering emotions from current events ("If Anything Happens I Love You"). I think the last of these - "If Anything Happens" - will win not only for the manipulation but the involvement of some big Hollywood names. But the deserving winner here would be "Genius Loci." Overall I can't say anyone needs to run to see any of these, though.
Documentary: These are almost always brutal, and this year is no exception. Four are tough watches in different ways, none more so than the doc "Hunger War" about the Yemeni war, which shows several children dying of malnutrition, people being bombed, etc. I wouldn't have watched except I feel I have to, but while the subject matter was important, the doc actually wasn't terribly good even setting aside how hard it was to watch. If you want to see these, I can't even recommend watching this one. "A Concerto is a Conversation" is the sweetest and easiest to see, the only one not entirely brutal even though Jim Crow South figures heavily in, but compared to the others sort of "small." "Colette," about a 90-year-old French woman visiting the concentration camp where her brother died, is the sort of doc that it seems would win any other year if it weren't for the final two. It's lovely and gentle and heavy at the right times. But the two standouts are "Do Not Split," about the 2019-2020 Hong Kong protests, consisting only of powerful live footage of the protests and interviews with the participants, and "Love Song to Latasha." The latter is my favorite and also the one I think will win. It focuses on the young girl who was killed in LA by a grocer in the early 90s who thought Latasha was stealing an orange juice (she wasn't). I had a vague recollection of this incident, which was part of the impetus for the LA riots after the Rodney King verdict. This is a beautiful pastiche of interviews, recollections, and re-imaginings of Latasha and her friends and who they were (there is no existing footage of Latasha herself). It shows the tragedy in a loving, gentle way that is focused on who she was rather than (mostly) what happened to her. It's gorgeous and unique.