Ladies’ shoe stores…of THE FUTURE!

Previously on Midlife Crisis Crossover: Oscars Quest ’26 continues! Once again we see how many among the latest wave of Academy Award nominees I can catch before the big ABC ceremony, including all the shorts, most of which we’d never heard of before the Academy brought attention to them.

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 honoring, 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 Oscars Quest is not their problem.

Next up: this year’s five Best Live-Action Short Film nominees, ranked. Links or streaming options are provided where available in non-pirated form.

1. Two People Exchanging Saliva (The New Yorker on YouTube). Phantom Thread‘s Vicky Krieps is the Twilight Zone narrator of a starkly black-and-white future taken hold by a painful new form of currency and fascist laws about PDAs. In this stylish dystopia, a peculiar symbiosis forms between a newly hired shopgirl (Portrait of a Lady on Fire‘s Luana Bajrami) and one of her upscale department store’s regular shoppers (Zar Amir Ebrahimi, from Ali Abbasi’s Holy Spider) who feels tired of the same-old same-old until she realizes she just needed to see through a fresh set of eyes. Writer-directors Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh have designed a wicked black comedy about interpersonal relations gone radically askew and a not-too-distant culture in which every consumer suffers gladly for their latest acquisitions.

“Fear not, milady! I, a man, can save you from anything!”

2. Jane Austen’s Period Drama (Kanopy and co-director Julia Aks’ YouTube channel). At long last, someone’s here to discuss the one female hardship that 19th-century authors couldn’t possibly have written about without being exiled from polite society. Comedic writer-directors Julia Aks and Steve Pinder boldly go where no old-fashioned man might go without screaming and running away, with Aks herself playing the Emma Bennet heroine who’s this close to landing the hero of her dreams (Hawaiian actor Ta’imua) until…well, any lady who knows what it’s like when a certain something starts at the worst possible starts at the worst possible time and place, you’ll get it. My wife took a while to stop laughing.

Archie Bunker’s Place: The Musical.

3. The Singers (Netflix). So deez guys, dey’re inna bar, tryna have a drink and fuhget their troubles, when dis mooch gets da noive ta walk in, hittin’ ’em up for free booze an’ den challengin’ em to a singin’ contest, right? I mean, who doezzat? An’ it’s kindasorta based on dis Turgenev short story that prolly didn’t quote “Unchained Melody”. Sam A. Davis, cinematographer on the Oscar-nominated documentary shorts Period. End of Sentence. and Nai Nai and Wai Po, steps up to the director’s chair for a sometimes hilarious, sometimes deeply stirring, all-barfly croon-off among a roster of guys recruited from reality TV (America’s Got Talent, The Voice Australia), from musical acts outside my sphere, and from your more unconventional corners of social media, escalating with each new contestant. But he knows exactly when to cut a gag short and winks the Moral of the Story at us: there’s always a bigger singing fish.

Remember when Miriam Margolyes was Steve Martin’s assistant in Little Shop of Horrors?

4. A Friend of Dorothy. Call it Rehearsing With Miss Daisy if you must, but Miriam Margolyes is an absolutely winning treasure as an elderly arts patron who meets a Black would-be footballer (Shadow and Bone‘s Alistair Nwachukwu) who’s disconnected from his passions. The camera settles in intimately alongside the erstwhile Madame Sprout as she teaches the youngster a thing or two about life, love, the stage, and the kindness of strangers. Curiously, it’s fun to see Stephen Fry pop in, but he doesn’t do much as the executor of her estate except literally hand over an obvious happy ending.

Gotta feel for poor Samir — nobody’s ever rude enough to hassle the baker or the candlestick maker.

5. Butcher’s Stain. A decidedly of-the-moment drama about a Palestinian meat-cutter working in an Israeli shop whose performance reviews are pretty great till an anonymous jerk accuses him of petty vandalism that’d be no big deal if not for the specter of October 6th. Unfortunately his boss and coworkers jump to instant poor conclusions with zero detective work and an almost childlike ignorance about widely known flaws in basic adhesives. Granted, the metaphor still functions on a base level in today’s increasingly short-tempered, dumbed-down world, but it’s also lackadaisically paced, as if the editor couldn’t bear to snip out a single frame of every take, which deflates the tension and hobbles any sense of urgency.