Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: my annual Oscar Quest continues! I’m still trying to catch all the Academy Award nominees I can before the big ceremony regardless of whether I think I’ll like them or not, whether their politics and beliefs agree with mine or not, whether they’re good or bad for me, and whether or not my friends and family will care in the least bit.

Each year since 2009 (except for 2021’s pandemic lockdown marathon) I’ve ventured out to the few Indianapolis theaters carrying the big-screen releases of the Academy Award nominees for Best Live-Action Short Film and Best Animated Short Film. Results vary each time and aren’t always for all audiences, but I appreciate the opportunities to sample such works and see what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences deemed worthy of celebrating, whether I agree with their collective opinions or not. My wife and adult son usually accompany me on the journey and we make a family outing of it, even though Oscar Quest is not their problem. Since 2019 I’ve also given myself extra credit for catching as many nominees for Best Documentary Short Film as possible, depending on their availability online, for the most complete shorts experience possible.

First up: my rankings of this year’s five Best Animated Short Film nominees, best to least best, all of which have good things going for them. Links or streaming options are provided where available in non-bootlegged form. At press time only one of them is viewable legally online.

* Letter to a Pig. A Holocaust survivor voiced by Alexander Peleg (Masada, A Woman Called Golda) shares his life story with a mixed-attention-span classroom. Some kids have predictably childish responses whenever the subject of pigs comes up, totally oblivious to the harrowing tale of how a pig saved him from Nazis. Others are more attentive, but one resents their immature peers and follows her own daydream logic too far to a harrowing conclusion. Israeli animator Tal Kantor renders the gripping WWII flashback in expressionist pen-and-ink a la Bill Sienkiewicz, broken up with glimmers of pigskin pink. She then flips to reverse-chiaroscuro precision-minimalism in the present, where only the storyteller has detailed flesh while the students are unfinished outlines. Obviously (well, I wish it were obvious to all) we don’t want to repeat the tragedies of those who preceded us, but what do we do with our righteous but uncontrolled fury at those who won’t listen to history’s warnings?

* Ninety-Five Senses (available free to Roku users on their Documentary+ channel). From Jared and Jerusha Hess, the married couple who brought you Napoleon Dynamite and Nacho Libre whether you wanted them to or not, comes a set of multimedia vignettes by six different animation teams, each punctuating the memories of a seemingly typical geezer voiced by the great Tim Blake Nelson. At first his ramblings are typical “Remember when…?” nostalgia-wankery structured as tributes to each of the five senses, as if that’s revelatory. Then partway through his listicle-memoir the Hesses yank off the rose-colored glasses and hurl us Wile E.-style into a brick wall. Once the “Wait, WHAT?” sensation wears off, what’s shared next feels, sounds, and looks a lot different.

* War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko. Co-writer/director Dave Mullins (previously Oscar-nominated for 2017’s Lou) shares a story credit with Sean Ono Lennon in this return to World War I, where a pair of unlikely opponents play chess-by-carrier-pigeon from their respective trenches until all is no longer quiet on the Western front. Peter Jackson’s Wētā FX handle the battlefield imagery using the Unreal Engine to recreate the thick-lined faux-comic mode of the Borderlands games; for anyone who knows those, it double-underscores the heavy, not-so-new war-is-a-game-without-winners metaphor. You can guess what ditty plays over the end credits, which is a Christmas song as much as Die Hard is a Christmas movie, but as an idealistic antiwar anthem it’s an evergreen sentiment in this thoroughly broken and disintegrating world.

* Pachyderme (which the subtitles helpfully tell us means “Pachyderm”). French animator Stéphanie Clément reveals a disturbing family history far too familiar to far too many. Long ago a li’l girl used to visit her grandparents filled with dread and unease. Grandpa’s proudest trophy is a large, decadent piece of ivory. His favorite hobby is fishing far from where anyone can hear. His other favorite hobby is why she hates visiting them and why this is no rosy family scrapbook. If it all weren’t so fragile and nearly too low-key in its endless-summer-from-Hell vibe, you could almost imagine an alternate ending where she’s screaming out Nirvana’s “Sliver” until someone mercifully calls the cops.

* Our Uniform. Remember Sunday-school felt boards? They’re back, and they’re not just for Christians anymore! As the first Iranian ever nominated in this category, Yegane Moghaddam pioneers the field of stop-motion fabric art as she relives memories of patriarchal dress code (not just in school) with every frame composed and sewn one by one. Her whimsical narrative is light on slamming the mandatory hijab, not exactly a full-onPersepolis rebellion, and consequently ends when she’s had her say, not necessarily with a Moral of the Story in mind, or at least not one delivered with any defiance to it.

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But wait! There’s more! For the first time since 2019, the five nominees were so short that two “Highly Commended” runners-up from the AMPAS’ category shortlist were packaged with the program to pad out the runtime and give us our tickets’ worth:

* Wild Summon. A gently scathing nature-documentary satire in which ’60s singer Marianne Faithfull narrates the life cycle of the salmon, except in this hyperreal reenactment the “salmon” aren’t fish: they’re tiny scuba divers, swimming and squirming and jetting down the streams and then up again, sometimes being tagged by scientists, eaten by predators or beheaded by fishermen. I’m guessing this one’s for the animal lovers out there.

* I’m Hip. John Musker, co-director of seven Walt Disney Animated Classics (Little Mermaid! Aladdin! Hercules! Moana!), spent his COVID-era downtime personally designing and animating (with assistants on the secondary functions) this music video mocking the easily targetable “hipster” in the traditional YouTube style — i.e., a Weird Al musical lampoon sans actual Weird Al — with slick visuals a tad wittier than the obscure ’80s tune they bring to life, whose jokes aren’t as fresh as they used to be. It’s also loaded with over 100 Disney-employee Easter eggs you can’t possibly get unless you worked with him, except the end-credits dedication to Eric Larson, one of Disney’s original Nine Old Men who was Musker’s mentor.

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Next up, the nominees for Best Live-Action Short Film, four of which can be seen at home:

* The After (Netflix). David Oyelowo (Selma, Lawmen: Bass Reeves) is a happy family man who unwittingly wanders into an episode of Luther and his whole world shatters. After an understandable retreat from reality, he finds new life as a quiet rideshare driver, transporting without connecting, but it’s not long before dormant trauma resurfaces. Co-writer/director Misan Harriman (a respected photographer making his moving-picture debut) pushes back with vehemence and grace on society’s longstanding, misguided rule-of-thumb that men should just swallow their grief, walk tall and keep moving like they aren’t having a slow-burn nuclear meltdown on the inside. He and Oyelowo (in possibly my favorite performance of his to date) also tenderly illustrate the simple power of an unexpected hug.

* The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (Netflix). The headliner of Wes Anderson’s recent Roald Dahl four-pack marks the very first live-action short film I’ve ever seen before it was nominated for an Oscar. (That used to be common with Disney/Pixar animated openers, till they gave up on shorts awards.) That said, I already covered this one but still enjoyed my encore of this Inception-leveled adaptation of an author’s tale of a millionaire’s reading of a doctor’s recount of a miracle-performer’s anecdote of a yogi’s gift. Anderson and Dahl seem so simpatico that our family now insists he should helm his own remake of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory with Tilda Swinton as Wonka.

* Invincible (director Vincent-Rene Lortie’s Vimeo channel). A wrenching lamentation for a childhood friend of the director’s who landed in French-Canadian juvie and didn’t live to adulthood. We aren’t told the crimes of Marc-Antoine Bernier (Léokim Beaumier-Lépine) — we’re only shown they weren’t bad enough for his family to reject him. He’s smarter than the average inmate, gentle toward those who love him, but a hissing TNT bundle around everyone else. The careful revelation of his mental health issues — what little is the viewer’s business — is all the more sorrowful as we and his loved ones are left to wonder what might’ve been if only he could’ve borne the weight, finished out his sentence, defied statistics, and moved on to a new chapter. But for many, even a single day of captivity can be an eternity far too long to wait out.

* Ridder Lykke (“Knight of Fortune” (The New Yorker on YouTube)). Men Grieving Badly, Part II: a low-key dollop of Swedish bittersweetness in which an elderly widower named Karl (Leif Andrée) comes down to the chapel morgue to view his wife’s body, only to entertain or create every possible distraction to put it off — find something broken he can repair, hide in the bathroom, accompany another widower (Jens Jørn Spottag) whose own search for closure begets bleak-humored misadventure, whatever it takes not to open that coffin, accept reality, and begin counting the regrets for his longtime inexpressiveness.

* Red, White and Blue. Pitch Perfect‘s Brittany Snow is a struggling single-mom waitress in Arkansas anxiously planning a pricey journey to Illinois, the nearest state to her with remotely liberal abortion laws. It’s also her daughter’s birthday, so she combines the two events into a single mixed-emotion road trip. Under the aegis of Executive Producer Samantha Bee, TV writer/director Nazrin Choudhury (Fear the Walking Dead) sets up their mother/daughter bonding experience — it’s the excited kid’s first time crossing the state line! — as the top of a gradually miserable descent into an egregiously stacked-deck pro-choice PSA using the most extreme of extremely extremist examples, which kindasorta works if the intended mission statement was a modest “States should at the very least offer certain obvious-sounding exceptions” rather than a generalized argument for a nationwide Roe v. Wade comeback. I guessed the sucker-punch twist near the end before it landed, but I was more surprised by the final minute’s worth of And They All Lived Happily Ever After, which seemed less “Down with the patriarchy” and more “Life will find a way.”

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And finally, the available nominees for Best Documentary Short Film, all of which are available today to You, The Viewers at Home, depending on your streaming subscriptions:

* The Last Repair Shop (Disney+, Hulu, and the L.A. Times on YouTube). As a poor kid in junior high band, I rented a bass clarinet for three years but could never afford ownership and haven’t played since. Kids in the Los Angeles Unified School District have the blessings of free instruments as needed and of free instrument repairs. Co-directors and Oscar-nom veterans Kris Bowers (A Concerto is a Conversation) and Ben Proudfoot (a winner with The Queen of Basketball) go behind the workbenches of that titular shop whose form of benevolence has become a rarity among American schools. Interviews alternate between the kids whose lives are invested in their performances and the diverse team of craftspeople whose stories range from almost-famous contentment (Duane Micheal from Bodie Mountain Express, a band that opened for Elvis, worked with Colonel Tom Parker and even played Disney World!) to hard-luck survival (the Worst Tragedy Award might go to the Armenian who grew up in Azerbaijan and had family killed in the exodus). 13-year-old me couldn’t help feeling a little emotional seeing the collective it-takes-a-village approach to saving kids’ dreams.

* The Barber of Little Rock (The New Yorker on YouTube). The year’s best Arkansas-related Oscar nominee celebrates the impressive deeds of Arlo Washington, a barber who worked his way up to starting his own barber college, which has gone so well that his next venture was an even greater leap of faith: starting his own nonprofit community bank. In the rarely attempted paradigm called a Community Development Financial Institution (and the only Black-owned one in Arkansas) Washington’s company supports and strengthens his community by providing loans — not the predatory kind — to disenfranchised individuals and small businesses who couldn’t get a beggar’s dime from ordinary lenders. Co-directors Christine Turner (Hulu’s The 1619 Project) and John Hoffman (a onetime Shark Week producer) interview him as well as some of his clientele and barber-college students whose lives have been changed by his kindness and his DIY spirit, running a 95% payback success rate. This short gained some extra attention by trading on the famous name of Executive Producer Dwyane Wade…but that sort of giving-back is the point.

* Island In Between (New York Times on YouTube). “More and more I feel like a kid whose parents are involved in a three-way custody battle — hostile, codependent, manipulative, each pair with their own dysfunctions. They all think they know what’s best for me. They don’t care what I want.” S. Leo Chiang succinctly sums up his heart’s tug-of-war among America, China, and Taiwan’s Kinmen Island. At various times he’s called two of those home, and come away with mixed feelings about the third, which he enjoyed visiting once but later grew chagrined as it asserted dominion over aspects of his life. The piece is kind of a personal tone poem anchored by one indelible image: an abandoned, calcified tank sunk partway through a sandbar — what it must feel like for international citizens to have each foot in separate worlds and resting comfortably in neither of them.

* Nǎi Nai and Wài Pó (Disney+). Filmmaker Sean Wang had fun shooting footage of his two elderly grandmothers who live together, dance, share a bed, bicker, put up with his occasional silly performative requests for the camera, and complain about each other’s farts, generating more fart-based dramedy than any other nominee in Oscar history. Sure, it’s an old-fashioned feel-good day-in-a-life check-in, but who among us olds doesn’t hope to weather our twilight years with a child-at-heart joy? If we can find a friend or loved one whose zeal matches ours, so much the better.

* The ABCs of Book Banning (Paramount+). I recall the power of reading Art Spiegelman’s first volume of Maus when I was 15, used to have an “I READ BANNED BOOKS” button on my comic-con bag till it fell off somewhere, and am not the least bit impressed by Florida’s elected leaders strutting before cameras as self-anointed, flag-draped “culture war” officers. But this lopsided polemic invokes Godwin’s Law in two scant minutes before it presents a series of “Schools should buy any books we want!” testimonials from the most advanced, erudite fourth-graders they could find (one wears a dress jacket with her outfit nicer than any I’ve ever owned), the sort of prodigies who surely can handle mature reading matter, while pretending they’re the baseline kids being “protected” and ignoring all the other kids in class. The makers have rebooted Kids Say the Darnedest Things into a straight-faced soapbox for tiny adorable human shields doubling as their rhetorical megaphones, conflate school libraries with public libraries, and present live readings of rather eloquent excerpts from the removed works that in multiple cases avoid revealing — or straight-up misrepresent — the actual parts that were deemed objectionable. Debatably “objectionable” in finger-quotes in some cases, to be fair. And granted, it’s Florida, so some probably were de-shelved with stupid cause. And I’m not sure a “both sides” debate would’ve accomplished much without expanding into a Shoah-sized epic, but its loaded questions are as intellectually dishonest in their own way as any given Ron DeSantis speech.

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…and those are the short that were. Coming in the weeks ahead we’ll have an updated rundown of the rest of my Oscar Quest ’24 home-viewing experience. It’s my thing even if people look at me funny whenever I bring it up and no one else is watching any of this stuff, not even the freebies. In fact, I made the mistake of bringing up the subject at a family gathering today and drew a round of blank stares till someone segued into Indiana Jones and suddenly everyone felt a lot more talkative. I should’ve known better, but sometimes I drop my guard and un-suppress the urge to be myself. That’s what this tiny wordy hideaway is for!