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: this year’s five Best Animated Short Film nominees, ranked. Three of the five are stop-motion and none are purely CGI. At least one of those factoids is surely a 21st-century record. Links or streaming options are provided where available in non-bootlegged form.

1. In the Shadow of the Cypress (Vimeo rental). One of the 2-D entries is also the strongest. Iranian animators Hossein Molayemi and Shirin Sohani create an interlocking fable of an old man with severe mental health issues, the daughter who simply cannot manage him anymore, and a whale beached right outside their home that she dedicates herself to saving instead. Seemingly minimalist in its broad negative spaces, its details are in the entanglement among those who seek purpose by helping someone else in the middle of their own most helpless moments.

2. Magic Candies. Venerated juggernaut Toei Animation grabs its very first Oscar-nom with adorbs non-anime. Veteran Dragon Ball director Daisuke Nishio collaborates with children’s-book author Baek Hee-na to adapt her 2017 book about a tween loner who buys a pack of unique gumballs from a mysterious candy shop, each of which lets him hear the impossible voices of the voiceless. Surprisingly, only one of the temporary speakers is an animal. Whimsical wizardry teaches our li’l hermit that human connection is the real magic trick, but it only has power if one of you talks first.

3. Wander to Wonder. The kindly host of a self-produced kiddie “puppet” TV show dies suddenly, leaving behind a trio of wee folk (not puppets, judging by their, er, anatomical correctness) trapped in his sealed-off hideaway home, desperate to survive and entertain themselves. Dutch animator Nina Gantz, with a cast that includes Toby Jones (last seen in the fifth Indiana Jones) and Amanda Lawrence (The Last Jedi, Christopher Robin), plunges The Borrowers into Lord of the Flies and the results are a demented Adult Swim pilot.

4. Yuck! (Vimeo rental). Loïc Espuche, a storyboard artist on the 2019 nominated feature I Lost My Body, crafts an oddly specific alt-reality where anyone who’s even thinking about kissing turns red-faced. A quintet of youngsters at a French campground think it’s hilarious to run around looking for kissy-faced couples and keep yelling “BEURK!” at them (the French word for “YUCK!”) until the mood is spoiled. Two of the kids soon realize to their “horror” that sooner or later everyone thinks about kissing. A bit cutesy and thin, as coming-of-age stories go.

5. Beautiful Men. Belgian animator Nicolas Keppens sculpts a trio of aging men who travel overseas for hair transplant operations, though two of them don’t know only one of them has an appointment. Dramedy ensues involving accidental public nudity, awkward cancer-lump checks, and other bros-being-bros setups that’re probably hilarious to the right guys, I guess? This is what I imagine a Judd Apatow “sex-positive” midlife-crisis comedy looks like, except (again, just guessing) the genitals aren’t usually Claymation.

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Next up, the nominees for Best Live-Action Short Film, four of which can be seen at home. For fun extra credit, see if you can guess which one was produced by Mindy Kaling and which one is from Executive Producer Adam McKay! The answers might not surprise you!

1. The Last Ranger. A horrifying closeup of the bloody works of South African rhino poachers, as helplessly witnessed by a local teen (a raw performance by young Liyabona Mroqoza) despite the best efforts of wildlife reserve rangers played by Avumile Qongqo (Max’s Raised by Wolves, Deep Blue Sea 3) and David S. Lee (The CW’s Nikita, The Librarians‘ Moriarty). Director Cindy Lee spares us the worst of the greed-driven bloodshed (not all of it) as we learn just how such brutes remove that precious commodity of a horn…though the tragic ending offers an uplifting coda by introducing us to an actual rhino who lost her horn in an encounter, survived against all odds, and inspired this very film. If Hollywood ever adapts her story, I need it to end with a spider spinning a web-sign at the end: “SOME RHINO”.

2. Anuja (Netflix). Writer/director Adam J. Graves takes us to India, where two orphan sisters work in the same garment factory, but big sister plans to get math-whiz li’l sister out of that life and pay her way into the right school by making and selling tote bags, if only they can find the right market and if li’l Anuja can resist an offer from their shady boss (Hotel Mumbai‘s Nagesh Bhonsle) to become his accountant instead. Anuja’s lower-caste world seems cleaned-up and low-risk compared to every other Indian Oscar nominee of the past decade, but its lighthearted aim to uplift and inspire is hard to deny, all the way to its ambiguous ending that could go one of two ways. Whoever in your viewing party picks the wrong path is a cynical beast who should be shunned.

3. I’m Not A Robot (The New Yorker on YouTube). Filmmaker Victoria Warmerdam takes us back to Belgium for a bit of topical SF in which a music producer (Ellen Parren) loses her cool when her software locks her out and she keeps flunking one of those stupid Captcha tests again and again and again. Despite her insistence that she is totally not a robot, the impossible question must be asked: what if she’s wrong? Is the ensuing quest to confirm her identity a gaslighting nightmare or an Ex Machina homage? The answer might be held in the hands of her “feminist” boyfriend, or by the strange woman he brings to their next chat, played by Thekla Reuten (In Bruges, the George Clooney actioner The American). The funny bits nail the right beats, but the serious swerves aren’t quite scary enough. I nearly gave it zero stars just for leading off with a painfully slow cover of Radiohead’s “Creep” (I loathe painfully slow covers), but gave back a few stars when it proved the perfect accompaniment — not just lyrically, but as an apropos symbol of flawed facsimiles.

4. A Lien (Vimeo). In the current political climate, a hot-button short about immigration was inevitable. William Martinez (who had a recurring role on Grey’s Anatomy season 19) plays a father and husband who’s finally started the long journey down the proscribed bureaucratic path toward legal American citizenship and shows up for his mandatory interview only to discover the whole thing is basically an I.C.E. trap. Filmmakers Sam and David Cutler-Kreutz were inspired by a 2018 New York Times article about how many would-be applicants are now even less inclined to apply for citizenship if all the necessary forms are just bait for their arrest. The camerawork gets jitterier as the suspense ratchets up, but it’s an eye-opening update to our long-held preconceptions about the process — how green-card marriages are no longer a guarantee of immunity, and how the goalposts can keep moving back and forth from one Presidential administration to the next.

5. The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent (Vimeo rental). If you’re well-versed in Croatian history, then you know the pain of the 1993 Štrpci massacre, in which a paramilitary squad calling themselves Osvetnici (“Avengers”) took nineteen people off a train and murdered them. For us history-deficient viewers (longtime MCC readers are aware of my defect here) we’re a bit behind, but we get the gist: armed thugs go through each of the passengers to select their innocent victim subset. The tricky part is guessing who’s the main character: Goran Bogdan (Fargo season 3) as the guy that the camera tracks most, who promises he’ll speak up but then doesn’t? Alexis Manenti (Athena, the 2019 Oscar-nominated Les Misérables) as the head thug? (Okay, probably not him. or IS IT?) Or is it Dragan Mićanović (Layer Cake, Coriolanus) as a former military man who won’t stand for this nonsense? The short doesn’t depict the entire incident, so we’re spared the bloodshed at the end, as well as the chills that would grip the survivors for some time to come. The highest compliment I can pay writer/director Nebojša Slijepčević is that this made me want to know more.

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And finally, the four available nominees for Best Documentary Short Film that are available today to You, The Viewers at Home, depending on your streaming subscriptions or rental options:

1. The Only Girl in the Orchestra (Netflix). Orin O’Brien is the daughter of cowboy actor George O’Brien (Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans“, John Ford’s Cheyenne Autumn) and John Wayne’s frequent love interest Marguerite Churchill (costar of Dracula’s Daughter). She also plays double bass and was the first woman ever hired to play full-time with the New York Philarmonic Orchestra — in 1966 under Leonard Bernstein, in the days when journalists thought the right approach to this major milestone was to describe how her instrument was as curvy as she was. The short (directed by her own loving niece Molly O’Brien) follows along on the eve of her retirement after a 55-year run. A true team player who’s never sought to be a soloist, she insists she isn’t that important. Former students, bandmates, and other loved ones testify otherwise, as do samples of her backing Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, among other works. This sort of role-modeling is how you encourage fledgling musicians to take pride in their music.

2. Incident (The New Yorker on YouTube). One day in 2018, tension already permeated the streets of Chicago when an encounter between a young Black barber named Harith Augustus (a.k.a. “Snoop”) and five beat cops — three of them first-year rookies — ended mere seconds later with Augustus shot dead down the street from his shop in front of a crowd of witnesses. Longtime documentarian Bill Morrison (presumably no relation to the comics artist) weaves together found-footage of the moments before, during and after his death entirely from security cams, a surveillance cam, multiple police body-cams, and at least one police dashboard cam — no dramatizations, no talking heads, no voiceover interpreting what we see for us. Some editing is done for clarification — transcriptions of the overlapping conversations and exclamations; subtitles for certain events occurring concurrently offscreen; and collation, cropping, and juxtaposing the crime-scene cleanup with the protests of the growing crowd and the freaked-out chatter among those police who’d bothered to turn on their mandatory body-cams. We eavesdrop on their attempts to convince each other of what just happened and the rightness of their snap judgments. Morrison lets us bear witness for ourselves, to pay attention, and to notice the exact moment — caught by at least two different cameras — that reveals their choices in the heat of a moment — which shouldn’t have had any heat in the first place — were far beyond poor.

3. I Am Ready, Warden (Paramount+). Capital punishment in Texas is examined through the case of death row inmate John Henry Ramirez, sentenced thusly for stabbing a clerk 29 times and taking a couple bucks off his body. Smriti Mundhra, a previous Documentary Short nominee for 2019’s St. Louis Superman, follows him during the week leading up to his execution and the days after — capturing his state of mind after he’s exhausted all avenues (not even a new D.A. who opposes the death penalty makes a difference) and made peace with his imminent demise, including one last heartbreaking phone call with the son he barely knew. On the flip-side, interviews with the victim’s son reveal his understandable disinterest in Ramirez’ final pleas for forgiveness, but his reaction to watching the execution live is far from relief or any sensation of justice. Related note: thanks to Mundhra now I’m aware Texas has a special program for the sole purpose of televising all their executions live, which sounds utterly ghastly, but at least it isn’t a 24-hour cable channel. Just the short about the channel was a tough enough watch.

4. Instruments of a Beating Heart (New York Times on YouTube). A distant cousin of The Only Girl in the Orchestra in that it also emphasized the importance of synchronizing with the band. Japanese first-graders are tasked with putting together an awfully young ensemble to perform an extremely simplified “Ode to Joy” at the end of the school year to welcome the next semester’s incoming class. Our Hero is a li’l six-year-old girl named Ayame who auditions, wins a percussion part, but doesn’t practice as obsessively as her classmates do and therefore keeps hitting her (precious few) notes at the wrong time, for which the teacher calmly but firmly shames her in front of the entire class at quite some length like Whiplash with manners. The camera insists we need to watch her bawl her eyes out in sheer mortification. Must we? Really? She’s SIX. Eventually there’s a happy ending and a moral of “Practice makes perfect and teamwork makes the dream work”, rather than watching her grow up into a school shooter, but I don’t think my heart was as warmed as it was meant to be.

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…and those are the short that were. Coming soon is the updated rundown of the rest of my Oscar Quest ’25 home-viewing experience. It’s been my thing for years, 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. Sigh.