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Best Live Action Short Film

Five wildly different entries in tone and style make this a particularly difficult category, but I think we can confidently knock off one or two. The first is the saddest of the lot, Sweden’s Helium, about a dying boy and a hospital janitor who befriends him while telling the boy a story about a Heaven-like place called “Helium,” where people go after they die. You would think that, given the subject matter, this movie is Academy catnip, but I have seen similarly-themed illness/death entries lose time and time again in this category. Again, the only way I can see this movie winning is if the rule change prompts more members to vote in this race, and the movie’s “pull on your heart strings” quality pushes it over the top, as it tends to in the Best Picture race.

It is also likely safe to say that the tensest of the nominees, France’s Just Before Losing Everything, the story of a woman in a race against time to escape with her children from her physically abusive husband, will not win. The film keeps you on the edge of your seat for most of the ride, but the conclusion does not quite live up to the tension it builds.

Next on the chopping block is Britain’s The Voorman Problem, about a psychologist sent to examine a prisoner who has convinced himself and others that he is God. This type of quirky, almost hipstery short has emerged victorious in the past, but has also lost when the idea is not necessarily as novel or engaging as one would expect. I expect Voorman will fall just short for that reason - the gimmick is not quite as inventive as it sounds.

So it comes down, in my view, to Spain’s That Wasn’t Me and Finland’s Do I Have to Take Care of Everything? The first is essentially a docudrama about a group of Europeans attempting to rescue children from being conscripted as soldiers in a war-torn African nation. The movie has some pretty shocking scenes and is unapologetically more violent than most shorts I have seen, but also enjoys a somewhat redemptive if tragic conclusion. The fact that it is told from two different perspectives and sort of in flashbacks adds to the stylishness of the film and may make it the deserving winner.

But Finland’s entry is also deserving for its comedic, light-hearted value. It is about a woman and her family as they rush to attend an important wedding, and all the comical obstacles that get in their way. In the years I have been watching this race, the light-hearted comedy has never emerged victorious here, unless it contains, frankly, some quirky narrative element like God of Love’s Midas-slash-Cupid-like protagonist. Do I Have to Take Care of Everything? admittedly does not have that, so I expect it to fall just short of That Wasn’t Me to win this on Oscar night.

Best Animated Short Film

This category is slightly easier to call in that there are only three and probably only two realistically vying for the Oscar. The two entries that I can confidently mark-off are the unconventional Feral and Possessions, from the United States and Japan, respectively. The first, as its name would imply, is about a feral boy found in the woods and taken to civilization. The animation is beautiful and as stylish dark as the title character’s wolfish impulses, but the allegorical transformation of the boy into leaves and then dust by the end is likely to produce more head scratches than Oscar votes. Possessions, too, has stylistic animation that effectively summons different color palettes to contrast different states of consciousness, and tells the story of a wanderer who finds refuge from a storm in an abandoned shed whose objects come to life and interact with him. Again, interesting and beautiful, but likely too esoteric for the Academy.

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