“Wuthering Heights”(2/12/2026)

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Warning: Review contains spoilers

I seem to have accidentally backed myself into being an Emerald Fennell defender, in part because I keep not realizing that she’s someone who needs defending.  When I saw her debut feature Promising Young Woman I actually thought I was something of a detractor in that I didn’t necessarily think it was Oscar worthy but I did like the film and thought mostly worked and given its awards run I guess I was in good company but that movie ended up having some really strong detractors who became a pretty big part of the discourse around it, which I guess is to be expected when you’re making a movie about a fraud topic like sexual abuse.  I was caught even more off guard by the discourse around her sophomore effort Saltburn, which I saw in theaters and thought was kind of a hoot and didn’t think I was in a kind of minority about that, but the discourse around that one shifted pretty heavily once it hit Amazon Prime and it became apparent that some people really hate that movie.  Honestly I was kind of caught off guard with just how much people viewed that movie as a major provocation when I viewed it more as a really well made kind of delicious almost campy little satire.  Though I very much know what I’m getting into discourse-wise in part because the film’s detractors have not waited for it to come out on streaming this time around, in fact they haven’t even waited long enough to even see the damn thing.  There are a strange number of Internet posts and videos harshly criticizing the movie seemingly sight unseen based on casting choices and a trailer.  These people weren’t just gauging anticipation mind you; they seem to have entire essays about why the film is bad without even seeing it.  It’s one thing to have suspicions about casting choices especially when it’s for an adaptation like this, but at the end of the day you don’t actually know what an actor is going to do with a role until you see it.  And as for judging movies by trailers, well trailers are advertisements they exist to lie to you, it’s worse than judging a book by its cover in some ways.  And in fact I would say that the trailer for “Weathering Heights” is misleading… though there’s a very good chance the final movie will actually piss the same people off even more than the trailer did.

I’m not going to pretend to be an expert on the text of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel of the same name; I was assigned to read it in high school AP English class and read it with all the diligence of a 16 year old being told to do homework, which is to say I probably skipped some chapters and consulted Cliff’s Notes a bit and haven’t really revisited it since though I have seen several of the adaptations.  In fact when this new version was announced I was a little surprised because in a lot of ways I felt like Andrea Arnold had already made a somewhat definitive adaptation for our times back in 2011.  That version was gritty and R rated, cast a person of color in the lead, and had a moody A24 looking style to it… but at the end of the day that was still kind of an independent movie.  It didn’t have any stars in it and it was done in kind of Andre Arnold’s usual social realist style despite being a period piece and it generally didn’t draw the hugest of audiences.  Now 15 years later with this new version Emerald Fennell seems to be trying to split the difference a little; the film is definitely willing to do things that you would not see in a Masterpiece Theater adaptation and has a modern sensibility in various ways but it is still trying to be this kind of big budget lavish production, at least one you can cut a trailer for that looks like it would appeal to your more traditional audience for these sort of literary costume dramas.

Emerald Fennell does take significant liberties with the text of Brontë’s novel but in some ways that’s de rigor at this point.  I don’t think any feature film version of Wuthering Heights has even attempted to adapt the novel’s second half in which we explore the next generation of Lintons and Earnshaws and this is no exception.  So don’t expect to see Cathy’s ghost coming home begging Heathcliff to let her into her his window because she’s so cold.  The film also completely eschews the framing story with Mr Lockwood and perhaps most shockingly it completely eliminates the character of Catherine’s asshole brother Hindley, whose abusive behavior is what ultimately motivates Heathcliff’s revenge plot in the first place.  Here those abusive tendencies are all placed on Mr. Earnshaw himself, who becomes a composite of the two characters somewhat muddying the narrative of Heathcliff childhood and also kind of giving him less to do once he’s returned.  Beyond that there’s quite a bit more overt sexuality in this version of the story.  Obviously there’s always been a undercurrent of sexuality and this story from the very beginning, but I’m pretty sure this is the first version which has had a scene of Catherine straight up flicking her bean out on the wily windy moors and it’s probably the one that most brazenly ditch subtext and have Catherine straight up cuckold her husband once Heathcliff returns.  In fact there’s an undercurrent (and an overcurrent) of sadomasochism throughout this movie and perhaps a suggestion that a lot of what’s happening between Catherine and Heathcliff is a manifestation of their trauma from childhood abuse on the part of the father, it which is a decent idea on paper but which probably comes off a bit blunt in execution, which you could probably say about a lot of the movie.

Stepping away from the thematic elements for a second I will say I think Jacob Elordi’s casting as Heathcliff pretty spot on, At least if you don’t want to get into the debate about whether or not Heathcliff is actually a character of color in the book (which I have no intention of wading into given that George W Bush was still in office the last time I read the damn thing).    Elordi certainly looks like the type of guy several women would quickly become infatuated with and does a pretty good job selling the “swarthy foundling to aristocrat” glow up the character goes through after the time jump.  Also pretty good at pulling off the passive aggressive jerk elements of the character, kind of drawing off the work he did as the school bully of sorts in “Euphoria” and he also does well when asked to be tormented and obsessive for many of the same reasons.  Margot Robbie’s casting is a little harder to justify as she’s getting a bit outside the age range of someone who can play this character.  She is only about seven years older than a Elordi but it hasn’t plausibly played a high school student in recent memory like he has, and that’s an issue given that she’s kind of supposed to be playing a flighty teenager during the sequences before Heathcliff leaves, and this comes off a lot less sympathetic when a 35 year old is playing the character.

That having been said sympathy maybe isn’t what Fennell is going for, In fact one of the defining elements of this movie is that it’s a lot harder on Catherine than these adaptations usually are.  The usual take on Catherine is that while she is complicit in her family’s mistreatment of Heathcliff to some degree and that greed got to the got the better of her to some extent when she agreed to marry Linton, as a woman of her time she didn’t have a lot of agency in all this and that she’s ultimately something of an innocent victim caught in the crossfire of Heathcliff’s revenge plot.  This adaptation on the other hand suggests “maybe Catherine was kind of a messy bitch who bears a lot of responsibility for all of this herself.”  That’s certainly the approach that Margot Robbie takes to the character and is very willing to explore the fact that this woman was quite the craven gold digger who led two different men on through indecisiveness, was a complete jerk to her sister-in-law, and was completely incapable of moving on from a situation that was plainly unfixable.  This version absolves Heathcliff in the slightest, he’s as creepy as ever, but Fennell definitely thinks it takes two to tango and if you set the age differences apart I think Roby is pretty good for the version they’re going for.

I’ll also say on the positive side that I do quite like some of the streamlining that was done to the story here.  My biggest complaint about the book reading it as a teenager was that there were just way too many characters all of whom seemed to just randomly die whenever it suited the plot, and this version manages to bring that to a minimum, though there are some new inclusions here that seem a bit out of place like it’s fixation on hangings (which is introduced but never pays off) and a very strange scene involving voyeurism and two otherwise plot irrelevant characters.  Visually the film is interesting… the Moors certainly look pretty good and the film finds something of a balance between historical accuracy and going ham on the expressionism in the sets.  There’s certainly décor in these houses that is pretty wild But there’s not necessarily anything in the costuming or even the set decoration that’s completely inconceivable in the 18th century, at least as far as my untrained eye could detect and Fennell is willing to use some kind of unnatural lighting to almost give certain shots the look of a romance novel cover, particularly in scenes where the emotions are running hot.  The music is a bit more of a mixed bag though.  Fennell commission some songs from Charli XCX for use in the movie and they actually do sound pretty fitting on their own and walk a nice tightrope between being modern while not feeling wildly anachronistic in the period setting but I’m not sure their actual use in the couple of scenes they show up in is all that effective or inspired.  I feel like the movie needed to either lean into that music more or just drop it.

So at the end of the day what are we going to do with this movie?  A lot of people are going to dismiss this as a horny bastardization of a literary classic for a generation incapable of handling subtext and attracted to outlandishness… and I’m not exactly sure I can defend it from those charges but I’m also not entirely sure that’s a bad thing.  Look Wuthering Heights is one of these stories like “Romeo and Juliet” or “Dracula” done so many times In the past and that will be done so many more times in the future that I kind of don’t really expect anyone adaptation to be in any way “definitive” in the way that something like Greta Gerwig’s Little Women seem to be.  Rather I’m more interested to see each adaptation take some big wild swing at the text and see if it can find some new and modern way of updating it.  In spite of its many imperfections, in fact probably because of its many imperfections, this will if nothing else prove to be a very memorable entry into that lineage of adaptations and I do think there’s some value in that.  That said if you have never read or seen any version of Wuthering Heights before this is going to be a very strange place to start.
***1/2 out of Five

January/February Round-Up 2026 (2026 Releases)

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28 Years Later: The Bone Temple(1/17/2026)
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Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later… was a real standout reboot last year and among the interesting things about it was that it was apparently the first in an entire trilogy of new “28” movies written by Alex Garland and produced by Boyle, although the director chair for this second film in the trilogy was handed over to Nia DaCosta, who pares back some of the visual experimentation of the first movie but who is otherwise making a pretty direct sequel with much of the same cast and reusing various sets including the titular bone temple.  As we saw in the post credits scene of the first movie this focuses on a strange gang of roving killers called the “Jimmys” who style themselves after the now disgraced British entertainer Jimmy Savile who the thirteen year old protagonist of the first movie falls in with and kind of can’t escape.  The film definitely expects you to have seen the first movie and kind of drops you into the sequel without doing a lot to catch you up and it’s a touch awkward that a lot of the character work involving that teenage protagonist has sort of already been done off screen and he’s a bit more reactive this time around.  The focus is more on the supporting cast this time around, particularly the Ralph Fiennes character who has a lot more screen time this time and gets a whole sub-plot surrounding that “Alpha” infected he was seen working with in the last movie, and then there’s also a focus on Jack O’Connell as the villainous leader of the “Jimmys” who chews the hell out of the scenery as he moves through the world in the most psychotic ways possible.  In general, the film is in an odd place in that it has a clear case of “middle chapter” syndrome when it comes to the returning characters even as it tells a somewhat standalone story when it comes to the O’Connell character and that’s a little awkward, but it makes up for this with some real standout moments and some pretty savage violence for the hardcore fans.  I’m not sure I’d call it a significant improvement over the first movie or a downgrade from it either and would like to see how that third movie turns out before I determine the full legacy of this larger project.
***1/2 out of Five

Send Help(2/1/2026)
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When I first saw the trailer for the movie Send Help my first thought was wow did they take the last act of Triangle of Sadness and expand it into B-movie genre feature?  Then I saw that Sam Raimi himself was in the director’s chair and decided thateven if that’s true probably worth a look and having seen the film I can say “correct on both counts.”  The film looks at a slightly contrived scenario in which a company’s private plane crashes in the Pacific stranding a CEO (Dylan O’Brien) on an island with and underling he had previously disrespected (Rachel McAdams) but who apparently has a lot of survival skills she studied in hopes of auditioning for the show “Survivor.”  As such the rich and pampered boss must rely on the skills of the person they view as beneath them in order to survive and can no longer take credit for her work.  There are a couple different directions that could go At times it threatens to turn into a Swept Away type scenario, which I would’ve hated, but it doesn’t go all the way there.  It also doesn’t completely dive into the eat the rich possibilities of this either; Rachel McAdams’ character is not a perfect victim (her fellow underlings at the office don’t seem to like her much either), she has plenty of flaws of her own and her conduct on the island is not entirely righteous.  Sam Raimi is pretty able to jazz up the proceedings with his gonzo style and when the film needs to get violent he walks a nice tightrope in making it both grisly but also kind of fun.  I do think the film starts to lose its way a bit in the third act when some of the McAdams characters flaws it really starts to pile up in odd ways (like a certain moment involving a poorly buried hand) and that Triangle of Sadness similarity does get to me about.  Still as January releases go this is pretty good, worth a look for sure.
*** out of Five

The Moment(2/9/2026)
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I’m not sure I’d call myself a fan of Charli XCX exactly, though I more more or less liked most of her the music I’ve heard from her.  I remember hearing that “Boom Clap” single back when it was on the radio and some of the other tracks she put out in that era but I was mostly checked out when she went back underground and became more of a critic’s favorite up until the release of the Brat album.  That record was something of a career breakthrough for her and like a lot of people I gave it a listen after it got stellar reviews and rather liked it and I’ve been brushing up on her since.  Having said that I can’t say I’m terribly connected to the public persona she’s curated in which she comes off this cool kid with a big network of influencer friends who is also a coked out party girl but, not in an out of control way, and who’s less vapid her behavior might lead you to believe.  Lots of contradictions in the portrait she’s painting of herself with her music and public appearances and that is likely to be further complicated by her new movie The Moment, which is a mockumentary that in many ways seems to be a bit at odds public persona and is also probably not that related to her private one.  On some level it’s almost a parody of the kind of tour documentary that an artist like Charli XCX would never be involved with.  Perhaps it’s most analogous to that season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” where the cast of Seinfeld reunites without reuniting, the film depicts Charli XCX selling out without selling out.

Generally Charli XCX Is known for being a particularly savvy pop star who meticulously crafts her image but that’s not really the fictionalized Charli XCX is not really like that.  This Charli XCX is more like the Charli XCX who gets cripplingly insecure when Taylor Swift showed up at the backstage of her boyfriend’s shows.  With Brett being a success she’s now suddenly surrounded by record label figures who are somehow simultaneously “yes men” while also wild women manipulative, The worst of them being a director chosen to film her upcoming Amazon special played by Alexander Skarsgård and she doesn’t handle it great.  There is quite a bit of record industry satire here and Charli XCX whole job of making fun of herself occasionally but this is not this is Spinal Tap and you shouldn’t go to it expecting it to be a full on comedy.  I am also not really sure that someone unfamiliar with Charli XCX is going to get much of anything out of it.  One could probably get the gist of her deal from the movie without a whole lot of context but I’m not sure if they’re going to care.  That said I could see this movie getting something of a cult following especially amongst Charli XCX’s as the years go by.  There’s kind of a long history of cult musicians making movies that don’t really get appreciated until years later and I can see this being in that lineage.  That said it’s got a pretty limited audience and might have been better served as a straight to streaming type deal then as a full A24 release.
*** out of Five

Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie(2/13/2026)
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Nirvanna the Band the Show the Movie Is a movie that I wish had a different title because the title does have takes a lot of explaining.  The film appears to be based on a TV show that aired on Viceland, which is why you’ve probably never heard of it, and that show was itself based on a web series that dates back to 2008 (which I also never heard of).  And the “Nirvanna the Band” in the title is the fictional band that the show’s two characters are in, which has nothing to do with the actual band Nirvana (of “Smells Like Teen Spirit” fame) and instead the name seems to be used just as a joke suggesting the band members are so ignorant and impractical that it never occurred to them that jacking another band’s name would be confusing.  Of course calling this a “band” in the first place is probably misleading in the first place as only one of these guys plays an instrument (a piano) and it’s kind of unclear even what genre of music they play.  Rather it would seem that the premise of this is that these guys only ambition is to play at this club Toronto and they hatch these insane elaborate plots to achieve this goal frequently all of which blow up in their faces (I’m not sure if simply paying to book an appearance at this place has ever occurred to them) and they’ve apparently been trying to do this for 17 years at this point.  The film picks up with these guys now in middle age but still seemingly roommate living a fratty existence and making doomed attempts to play at this club when suddenly one of their schemes actually kind of comes together and they accidentally build a time machine that sends them back to 2008 where they encounter their younger selves setting off series of Backs of the Future inspired events.

That this was a spinoff of ATV show that I haven’t seen did not bother me too much, you do get the impression that these are personalities that have been established elsewhere and there may be a couple running gags that have kind of carried over hadn’t been introduced but for the most part they seem to have made this knowing not everyone’s going to be coming in as an established fan and you get the gist of it pretty quickly.  At the center of it you have your fairly traditional comedy duo with Matt Johnson as the fool instigating all sorts of chaos (the Randal) and Jay McCarrol as the smarter friend but not necessarily smart enough to avoid going along with all the insane chaos (the Dante) neither of them are exactly logical thinkers.  In fact most of the film’s comedy comes from their strange tunnel vision and the misunderstandings it elicits.  I guess in theory they have cameramen following them (The film is technically a mockumentary I guess) but they seldom interact with the leads or shape the story so it’s kind of a film without any supporting characters really.  The time travel stuff is very fun and is likely what really sets this apart from the series it’s based on, in fact on that front the whole film is a lot more ambitious than its initial esthetics would lead you to believe.  The exact time travel doesn’t exactly hold up, don’t expect Primer out of this, and there are times when the character’s illogical behavior just kind of seems frustrating rather than funny.  That all having been said the film is pretty funny and kind of charming; like a lot of the more successful comedies of recent days it manages to Mix some of its more outlandish comedy with a certain sweetness.  Comedy seems to be one of the few genres that takes male friendship particularly seriously and this is a good example of that.  In an era where we’re kind of starved for straightforward comedy movies it’s nice to have this… really wish they had gone with a different title though.
***1/2 out of Five

EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert(2/26/2026)
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In a lot of ways the movie EPiC: Elvis Presley in Concert lays out its origin story pretty clearly in its trailer, which explains that during production Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic some new footage of Elvis’ Las Vegas residency performances was discovered and it is now being presented in this new film for the first time.  That said the trailer is still a bit unclear about the extent to which this new movie is a concert film or a documentary or what, and the answer to that is kind of both.  To be clear this new footage reportedly only consists of about 45 minutes of video, most of them outtakes from existing Elvis concert films, and the footage was found without sound so it’s presented here as video synced to live performance audio from other sources, so I’m not sure just how revelatory is going to be for the dedicated Elvis fan.  This also means that the “ concert” replicated here is not a single set from any given night but rather something stitched together through montage, and the film is not shy about this, throughout the film you’ll see fluctuations in video source, costuming, and frankly waistline constantly even mid song as it uses various shots from various performances across the years.  This is all then tied together with documentary elements built around audio from interviews that Elvis gave himself about his life story which is then augmented with archival footage from his career, a bit like the David Bowie documentary Moonage Daydream.  I would say that’s probably the weakest element of the film, there’s very little in these interviews that will come as a surprise too much of anyone with even a cursory knowledge of Elvis’s career, including from Luhrmann’s Elvis biopic, in fact I’d say this is even more reverential and hagiographic than that movie was.  That having been said, I’m not going to tell you this concert footage isn’t really good, the man was considered a legendary performer for a reason.  These residency performances were by all accounts a sort marathon of work, we’re told in the film that they had a repertoire of something like a hundred songs in rotation and that set lists were largely improvised based on audience vibe.  Elvis was also trying to connect with younger generations during this period, so while he was certainly doing a lot of his old hits as well as some of his later triumphs like “Suspicious Minds” and “Burning Love,” he was also rotating in songs from more contemporary artists like the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel and he brings an interesting flair to some of these.  If your goal is to just get a big screen experience from “The King” the movie will serve you well, but again I suspect a lot of this footage is less novel than the advertising is letting on and I’m not sure how much this really has to offer to people who aren’t already very much in the tank for this guy.
*** out of Five

2025 Oscar Nominated Shorts – Documentary(2/21/2026)

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At last year’s Academy Awards both the live action and animated short categories produced shocking upset winners, but that did not happen with the documentary short category, that one pretty much went as expected.  The general rule of thumb in that category, whose nomination slate is generally filled with grim stories of world tragedy, is to pick the one lighter somewhat uplifting nominee usually a profile of someone or a sophisticated advertisement for a charity.  Last year’s winner, a profile of a female double bass violin player called The Only Girl in the Orchestra, was right in line with that pattern.  That’s probably not going to help this year though as the academy seems to have somewhat outdone themselves in picking a slate of nominees that are very uninterested in being “light” with at least four of these shorts being about very depressing topics, And the only apple in this basket of orange is a rather experimental thing that is not gonna go down easy with voters either in its own way.  In fact the shorts TV theatrical presentation of the nominees Seems to really lean into this as they seem to have programmed them to start with that one experimental short and then get increasingly depressing as they go… very pleasant night at the movies.

Perfectly a Strangeness

The presentation begins with the orange in a basket of apples.  Perfectly a Strangeness is a fifteen minute experimental documentary from Canadian filmmaker Alison McAlpine, who is best known for the feature documentary CIELO, Whose description on Wikipedia reads “Filmed in the Atacama Desert in Chile, the film is about the myths, stories, existential queries and the beauty of the night sky in the region.”  This short would seem to be something of an extension of that as it’s filmed outside and inside of an observatory in that same desert and also concerns the night sky.  It does not, however, feature a single human being.  Instead it is following a pack of donkeys walking around the desert and into the observatory area and the film is supposed to sort of form this into a story in which we intuit that the donkeys discover the cosmos or something.  I guess the big provocation here is that it’s kind of questionable to me whether this can even be called a documentary.  The donkeys are real, the observatory is real, but it’s not like these donkeys just happened upon location while the camera crew is in place.  Presumably the film makers put them there and directed them where to go and set up the rather elaborate shots of them along the way… isn’t that basically just a form of scripted storytelling?  Setting that question to the back burner I guess I don’t really get a whole lot out of this besides the fact that it’s pretty, almost more of an art installation than a film.  I’m not really sure what this is doing here, but I wouldn’t say I disliked for what it was and it’s probably for the best that it didn’t overstay its welcome.

B-

Its Oscar Chances: Very Low.  This film’s one advantage at the Oscars is that it’s not like the other four.  I could maybe envision some voter watching the other four in all their depressingness and feeling some sort of catharsis out of this donkey movie and almost voting for it as a protest, but I have my doubts that’s going happen too many times.  A similar dynamic to that may have propelled some of the more “puff piece”-like profile documentaries in the past, but given this movie status as an experimental art film it’s kind of just as challenging as the other four but in different ways and would probably weird out the type of people who would think that way.

The Devil Is Busy

With the second short, The Devil is Busy, we already start getting into more fraught territory as it involves abortion rights.  The film looks at the inner workings of an Atlanta abortion clinic and as its main lens it follows the clinic’s head of security named Tracii over the course of a single day from opening to close.  Along the way we see some of the unique challenges the clinic faces from needing to layout food for arriving patients who may have had to drive in from out of state to having to meticulously check every room in the morning to make sure no one’s hiding in there to attack.  In addition the clinic needs to deal with a variety of rather vicious protesters who hassle anyone who enters the building, many of whom Tracii has come to know of by name, including one who had previously been convicted of a hate crime.  The film gets into how the recent erosion of American abortion rights has made operating this clinic increasingly difficult but we also get a sense that they’re predetermined to keep on going despite the demoralizing situation.  The selection of Tracii as the central figure here was smart; The abortion doctors here also make compelling subjects during their appearance but Tracii has a certain blue collar folksiness to her and it’s also revealed that she’s a rather religious person and approaches this very differently than the protesters outside the clinic (the title refers to a statement she makes about said protesters) And that gives her a certain moral authority in the center of the film.  The film does not spend too much time weighing in on the debates around the issue at its center, it more or less takes it as a given that its audience is pro-choice, but it does a good job of illustrating what this issue means in practice rather than in the abstract and how the passage of these laws handcuffing these clinics effects real people beyond being just a topic of debate around constitutional rights.

A-

Its Oscar Chances: Very good.  The film has relatively stiff competition this year and that’s why I’m not too inclined to call it a sure thing but this definitely does have a lot going for it.  Notably the film was co-directed by Geeta Gandbhir, who also directed The Perfect Neighbor, Which is the perceived frontrunner in the documentary feature category meaning she may well walk away from Oscar night with two awards for two different documentaries.  I’m not sure if that’s precedented or not.  It’s entirely possible that her being on the promotional circuit for both movies could give each a boost, alternately it might distract her from this one in favor of the feature.  Setting that issue aside this has a lot going for it on its own merits and could fit in a nice Goldilocks spot between the perceived frivolity of perfectly a strangeness and the deathly seriousness of the other three nominees.

Armed Only With A Camera: The Life And Death Of Brent Renaud

The Brent Renaud referenced to in the title to the third of the nominated films here was a war photographer who spent the better part of 20 years covering various conflicts and hot spots ranging from the Iraq War to the 2010 Haitian earthquake to the gang wars in Chicago constantly running towards danger carrying only a camera.  On March 13th 2022 Renaud was killed by Russian soldiers while covering the war going on in Ukraine.  The exact details of how he was caught in the crossfire are not delved into in too much detail here; this is less of an expose about Renaud’s death than it is tribute to his life, one that was put together by his brother and fellow war photographer Craig Renaud drawn extensively from the elder Renaud library of footage.  The film structures this by cutting between events happening around Renaud’s death (starting with the day of his murder up through his eventual funeral) and backstory about his life and his various escapades in hot zones.  More structure to have a lot of feature biographical documentaries are structured but it’s a little more jarring here.  Between all the “present day” events and explaining all of Renaud’s various escapades and hot zones don’t actually get a whole lot of time to discuss his actual personality beyond his profession.  We were told that he was apparently on the autism spectrum, but don’t get a whole lot of information about how that affected his day to day life or career, and while the glimpses we get to his various conflict trips they each almost feel like something that could have been their own documentary.  We get a similar and more detailed look at the life of a war photographer in the NatGeo documentary Love+War, which also came out this year and that movie wasn’t perfect either but it did at least have the time to really dig into a subject matter.  That having been said I am glad to have learned about Renaud and do you think this basically succeeded mission of being a sort of tribute to him.

B-

Its Oscar Chances: Middling.  I don’t want to completely count this movie out because it is ultimately a documentary about a documentarian, which may be a subject of special interest to the type of voter who’s inclined to vote in this category.  Additionally there could be a dynamic where a vote for this film feels like a vote for the subject, and in fact it sort of literally is that because the abundance of footage featured in the film shot by Renaud was apparently enough to get him a co-director credit despite the film having been about his own death.

All the Empty Rooms

Steve Hartman is a journalist best known for his film segments for CBS News which were often relatively fluffy human interest stories which in his words were intended to give people a renewed faith humanity after watching what was likely an otherwise grim newscast.  Not what you will get out of his new documentary All the Empty Rooms, which chronicles a project he says he endeavored on after having been asked one or two too many times to find silver linings in school shootings like acts of heroism in the chaos or communities coming together.  He instead wanted to chronicle the sheer naked tragedy of these events and the medium he came up with to do so was to go into the preserved children murdered during killing sprees and take photographs that would act as memorials for those lost.  The film follows him as he does the last of these photo sessions before revealing the project to the public on one of the CBS broadcasts and see him as he goes about the sensitive work of reaching out to these families and interviewing them about their lost children while doing these photo sessions.  The scenes inside the titular empty rooms are of course haunting and heartbreaking, with the various kid stuff still sitting there being a testimony to a life cut short.  One girl even has a set of letters that she was writing to her future self which will never be delivered which is the kind of thing that would have felt too “on the nose” if it had been written into a fictional film.  The film doesn’t do a whole lot to point towards the solutions to this crisis (e.g. hun control), so it’s pretty clear to me that Steve Hartman still kind of has that puff piece maker heart beating inside of him, but this project and film does still help illustrate how much of a deep scar this issue in American society.

B

Its Oscar Chances: High.  The very premise of this short pretty clearly shows the appeal it would have to voters.  Anything this emotionally charged is bound to get attention and make people interested.  Steve Hartman is of course something of a “name” for his work with CBS, maybe not someone I have a deep pre-existing well of knowledge and respect for but which some voters might.  The only thing really holding it back is that status is something about “making of” for a photography project rather than a film wholly unto itself.  It’s kind of going into the aftermath of a situation rather than the situation itself like some of its competitors are.

Children No More: “Were And Are Gone”

Moving on from children killed at home to children killed abroad, the final of the five nominated shorts is Children No More: “Were And Are Gone”, which addresses the children killed in Gaza over the course of Israel’s campaign in that region.  More specifically the film looks at a protest movement within Israel itself focused on bringing attention to these children.  These protesters mostly bring attention to this through silent protests in which they stand on the street holding posters with pictures of Palestinian children killed by the IDF along with some details and the slogan “was and is no more” to indicate their passing, a sentence I assume makes more grammatical sense in Hebrew.  This tactic actually puts them very much at odds with the rest of the Israeli anti-war movement which tends to focus on the extent to which Netanyahu’s actions we’re preventing the release of hostages or other internal Israeli concerns rather than the death and destruction being wrought upon Palestinian civilians.  In fact much of the film focuses on the violent hostility that passersby direct towards these protesters over the very notion that the death of Palestinian children is something to be mourned.  The film illustrates the length to which these protesters need to go to be non-confrontational and how they are in many ways confined to the most sympathetic areas, the Israeli equivalents of “blue states” I guess you could say.  The film can be cited to lack a major “arc” as the protesters are more or less in the same place at the beginning as they are in the end, and one could maybe argue the film could have been tightened a bit, but it’s definitely an eye opening look at just how radicalized a lot of the Israeli public is but also a testament to how there are people there who fight back against what their government is doing.

B

Its Oscar Chances: Not High.  The politics of Israel/Palestine are dicey to say the least and while the win for No Other Land last year does suggest there’s a constituency within the academy to “go there” I’m not sure how big that constituency is and I think it would still be ultimately be a hindrance on balance.  Even regardless of that definitely heard people have their complaints about this movie on just a basic filmmaking level, a lot of people think it gets a bit repetitive with how many of these protests it shows, and ultimately I don’t think it quite has the juice to compete against some of the heavier hitters here even if it’s about important subject matter.

In Conclusion

I’d say this is another pretty good slate of nominees!  There’s not a real stinker in the bunch and I’d think I’d be at least okay with any of the five winning.  Favorite is almost certainly The Devil is Busy which I think hits the near-perfect balance between important subject matter and unique and well done presentation.  I’d say that one has a very good chance of winning, but the front runner is probably still All the Empty Rooms just because of the emotional toll that one takes and the fact that it’s probably at least overtly political of the nominees outside of the highly experimental Perfectly a Strangeness, which is the only nominee here I think has no chance at all.  All that having been said I’m not sure there’s any doc here who which completely fits the stereotypical profile of who wins here, so I can’t be one hundred percent confident about anything and I’m interested to see how this works out.

2025 Oscar Nominated Shorts – Animated(2/21/2026)

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Last year I was pretty blindsided when I Am Not a Robot won Best Live Action Sort, but I was probably even more shocked when the Iranian film In the Shadow of the Cypress won for best animated as I think I had that ranked in fourth place in my predictions. In my defense though that was kind of a tough year to predict with no clear front runner that seemed to fit all the usual criteria for a winner in this, so in retrospect it’s a little less surprising than the I am not a robot win, but I was still shocked at the time.  This year is also challenging; yet again there’s no official Disney or Pixar film in the bunch with those companies seemingly not having as much interest in the short category, but I’d say the challenges that did come to the table are a bit stronger and a bit more competitive in general.

The Three Sisters

The first short in this program is one called The Three Sisters from the Russian animator Konstantin Bronzit, an industry veteran who has been nominated in this category twice before.  The film, which appears to be traditionally animated, tells a simple story of three sisters who live in a trio of houses on a tiny otherwise uninhabited island who lose some money in an accident I need to allow a tenant to rent out one of the houses while two of the sisters bunk together.  That tenant is a bulky sailor giving Bluto energy; a coarse but not necessarily bad person and he does help the sisters out from time to time.  Meanwhile these sisters seem to become pretty smitten with the guy, less because he is any extraordinary specimen of manhood but more because he seems to have the only penis within a certain radius of the island and the sisters who start the documentary out looking like old crones doing favors for the guy.  I wouldn’t exactly call this all very feminist: there seems to be a bit of an implication that these women need a man and the extent to which they all are willing to kind of make fools of themselves to keep them are… questionable.  That’s I don’t really feel like reading too much that too much in this light hearted comedy short with no spoken dialog.  On a technical level the short has some decent gags and also a kind of interesting visual style in which we consistently see the island all from the same angle just with different levels of close up and focus and I’d say the short more or less is effective at what it’s trying to be.

B

Its Oscar chances:  Middling to low.  There’s nothing necessarily here that would put off Oscar voters but it also Doesn’t have a lot of novelty to make it stand out especially against its flashier competitors.  In a lot of ways it kind of feels like the standard median example of the type of movie that gets nominated here but doesn’t win.  That having been said I can’t completely write the film off ‘cause it actually does have a lot of superficial similarities to last year’s winner In the Shadow of the Cypress, which had a kind of a similar 2D art style and was also set out on a sort of metaphorical island with only a couple people on it, but that short was much more serious minded than this one so the comparison only goes so far.

Forevergreen

I don’t know the exact budgets but I’m inclined to suggest that the film Forevergreen is likely the most expensive of the movies here or at least the one made with the most high tech software.  This is not a Disney film but it is made by Disney employees who were working on their own time on an independent project, but one that still has relatively cutesy Disney esthetics behind it.  I’m pretty sure this is entirely CGI animated but it is kind of intended to look like stop motion to some degree with the characters intended to having slightly stylized and blocky looks to them and having various imperfections in the way they move almost as if you can see fingerprints from animators manipulating physical objects.  The story, which has no dialog, is a sort of simple parable about a bear cub separated from its parents who is instead raised by a anthropomorphized Redwood tree only to wander off start a forest fire for which tree needs sacrifice itself to save the bear from.  Initially that kind of seems like a variation on the children’s book “The Giving Tree” which was itself a metaphor about parents giving everything for their ungrateful shitty kids but the metaphor here is actually a bit more grandiose.  The movie ends on a Bible which is a pretty strong head for what’s really going on here; the reason this was being made by Disney employees on their free time is because this is in fact a Christian metaphor.  The tree is God, the bear is the wandering flock, and the trees sacrifice is a Christ metaphor.  Not 100% sure I would have connected those dots without some background info that is definitely how the filmmakers have explained their creation.  It’s kind of a flawed metaphor on its face (The rules governing this tree are not very clear and its rebirth at the end is a little odd), but it’s not necessarily offensive or anything.  With or without all the Bible stuff the short is a bit too cute for its own good, but the art style is nice, and the metaphor is abstract enough to not feel preachy.

B-

Its Oscar Chances: Very High.  Generally speaking when there’s no Disney or Pixar movie nominated it’s a good idea to go with whatever movie most looks like a Disney or Pixar movie or has the most connections to the American animation community, and this year that’s obviously this one.  There’s also a somewhat dubious rule of thumbs suggesting that movies about animals have an edge in this category, which again would favor this one.  So on paper this is the obvious front runner, and if not for some pretty strong competition I’d probably say it was a lock.  The Bible thumping stuff could be a problem but I doubt too many casual observers are even going to notice that.

The Girl Who Cried Pearls

The third short here is a true stop motion film (mostly) called The Girl Who Cried Pearls, which was made by a French Canadian company called Clyde Henry Productions who were previously nominated for a short called “Madame Tutli-Putli” back in 2007.  The film was actually featured recently on an episode of the Youtube show Corridor Crew because it has a somewhat innovative system where CGI augments the facial animations of actual stop motion puppets, though this actually plays less into the film than you’d think because most of the film is a flashback that’s narrated by actor Colm Feore, who repeats the lines of the various characters without them actually moving their lips.  That said it’s certainly talkier than the last couple of shorts we looked at and tells the story of a kid living on the streets of turn of the century Montreal more or less begging for scraps like Oliver Twist.  The animation style here is very appropriately grimy they make these impoverished shacks look absolutely filthy.  The story is kind of a simple little fairy tale about this kid coming across girl who literally cries pearls that he retrieves unbeknownst to her and has something of a moral quandary about selling.  It’s kind of a simplistic little morality tale really but in part that’s because it’s kind of trying to feel like a genuine old timey story rather than something sophisticated and modern and if you can take it in that spirit it mostly works.  Here this kind of feels like the most fully fleshed out story and will work best for people looking for more of a traditional “movie” movie out of their animated shorts, and the stop motion production value is hard to deny.

B+

Its Oscar Chances: Decent to high.  While this short is actually only a couple of minutes longer than its competitors it certainly feels more eventful and a bit larger in scope and that can make you feel like more of a complete statement to voters.  That said while stop motion is a mainstay of this category it’s actually been on something of a losing streak lately.  I don’t think a stop motion film has won here since 2015 and I’m not sure how many industry connections these guys have.  Still I’d probably be predicting this in a less competitive year and I think it has a shot.

Butterfly

To my eyes the clear highlight of this bunch is Butterfly (aka Papillon), a French production based on the life of Alfred Nakache, an Algerian/French Jewish man swam at the 1936 Olympics before eventually becoming a victim of Nazi oppression the eventual occupation.  Nakache did survive the Holocaust but many of his family members did not and the film does get into that.  This is not however an entirely documentary style biopic and instead takes a slightly more impressionistic approach.  The film’s animation is intended to replicate oil painting, a bit like that Van Gogh movie Loving Vincent from a few years back, but I don’t think they were using actual actors as models here and the story is almost more of a fluid montage, almost like a dream.  I’m not sure the film really has that much unique or profound to say about Nakache’s life, it’s kind of just a catalog of events that happened to him in a way, but as someone who’d never heard of him before this was a bit eye opening.  What’s more of that animation style is really next level, there may have been movies using similar techniques before but it really works here, so just on the level visual beauty clears the field and the story itself is pretty interesting as well.

A-

Its Oscar Chances: High.  On one hand this doesn’t necessarily directly resemble the average winner in this category.  The winners here tend to be a bit more family friendly (this isn’t fully an adult animated film but it has what the MPA would call “thematic elements”) and this doesn’t have any major distributor behind it… but that animation style is definitely going to stick in voters memories, and not to be crass but the Holocaust does tend to be a subject that wins you Oscars.  So while this might not necessarily fit the exact profile of your average winner I think it can’t be counted out.

Retirement Plan

The shortest of the shorts here is a retirement plan, a seven minute film which is basically a short monolog is set to animation in which a young man (voiced by Domhnall Gleeson) talks about all the stuff he will finally get to do once he retires.  So he lists off a bunch of stuff like “ I will play the lifetime of computer games I missed out on” or “I’ll get a dog” with some of the suggestions being a bit more comical than others and things occasionally veering into the absurd.  The film is in the Academy ratio and the 2D animation is kind of minimalistic.  I don’t think they originally produced it but the film is currently streaming on the Youtube channel for The New Yorker magazine and that kind of fits because this animation sort of resembles the cartoon style that that magazine is known for.  It’s on a Youtube channel is also probably fitting because the film’s general brevity (even by short film standards) and the fact that the monolog feels more like a list Then a story kind of makes it feel less like a real “movie” per se.  Still I don’t want to discount the gags that are there which are often amusing, and of course the film’s message is pretty clear: something along the lines of “seize the day while you can don’t just wait for retirement for everything” which isn’t too much to hang a whole movie on but it probably is enough to hang a seven minute short on.  Overall it’s a work with modest ambitions but it’s perfectly fine at achieving those.

B

Its Oscar Chances: Low.  The brevity and simplicity of this thing are really going to work against it.  Something like this winning isn’t completely unprecedented, the short film Dear Basketball was also about five minutes long and was basically a monologue set to visuals but the victory Kobe Bryant vehicle was mostly chalked up to the Academy’s L.A. voter base stanning the Lakers And this movie doesn’t have a name behind it in the same way.  Beyond that it’s an animation geared towards adults, and those don’t tend to win unless they’re something pretty special.

In Conclusion: Overall I’d say this is a pretty solid slate!  Obviously I like some of these nominees better than others but I wouldn’t say any of them are outright unworthy. Clearly I like Butterfly the best of the bunch but The Girl who Cried Pearls would also be a worthy winner but if something like Forevergreen or Retirement Plan or even The Three Sisters won I wouldn’t be too mad.  As far as predictions go, well if the old rules apply then I’d say Forevergreen is clearly the front runner, but the short film wins last year have definitely made me reconsider whether those old rules do apply so but Butterfly or The Girl Who Cried Pearls has a shot.  I’d be pretty surprised if either the other two nominees won but probably not as shocked as I was when In the Shadow of the Cypress won so who knows.

The Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts 2025(2/20/2026)

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I am now in my 10th year of covering the Oscar nominated live action shorts which would seem to suggest I’m pretty familiar with what the Academy goes for in this category… perhaps too familiar.  In fact I totally wiped out in my predictions here last year in that I not only predicted wrong but I had completely dismissed even the possibility of the eventual winner, I’m Not a Robot, even being a contender.  It was a good short but the Academy rarely goes for genre stuff in this category and noi also oddly allergic to letting foreign language shorts win here even though they generally dominate the nominees.  So I’m going into this round of shorts with a bit more humility but I’m still keeping in mind how things with this category tend to go because this crop of nominees certainly isn’t breaking the mold.

The Singers

The first film in the ShortsTV presentation is The Singer, which is probably by default the most high profile short here simply because it has Netflix behind it.  The film also seems to have something of a talent of note behind in Sam A. Davis, who has primarily worked as a cinematographer and actually served as the DP for two previous nominee is in a short category, the short documentaries Period. End of Sentence and Nai Nai & Wài Pó, with the latter having seemingly forged a partnership with director Sean Wang resulting in Davis being the cameraman behind the Sundance favorite Dìdi.  As one would expect from a movie directed by a cinematographer this movie is pretty notable for its look: It’s shot in the Academy ratio on 35mm film (and it’s happy to include some print flaws so you know that) and it’s generally got some moody lighting.  That lighting is moody in part because this is set in a dive bar which are famously not very well lit places.  Per its opening title card it’s a modern adaptation of a short story by Ivan Turgenev about an impromptu singing competition that breaks out among the blue collar and entirely male bar patrons and while the first couple of participants are not that talented several of the people who start giving it a go turn out to really know how to sing.  The film’s biggest asset is atmosphere: the set sure does look like a real rundown northeastern bar and the patrons all do look like real bar patrons rather than central casting playing dress up and indeed the cinematography is quite pretty even though I think it over uses the close up.  Having said that I’m not sure what point this is supposed to be making: the patrons seem to be people living pretty rough lives including one who’s said to be an Iraq war veteran, but this singing competition doesn’t really seem to serve any real purpose other than to show that there are talented people in places like this and the short just kind of ends on a joke rather than culminating in something really meaningful.

C+

Its Oscar Chances: Decent to good.  Having Netflix on your side is almost certainly a net positive given that they have a huge marketing budget and they produced two of the last five winners in the category.  That having been said the two they got over the finish line were Two Distant Strangers and The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, which were both much more ambitious and conceptual than this in the latter film had a major filmmaker behind it, their track record with more “normal” short films like this is not so inspiring.  That Sam A. Davis appears to be a noteworthy rising talent also helps, as does the fact that this is the only American film in the bunch.  However I don’t think this really quite has the hook it needs and some of the other nominees here seem like they’re more completed statements, so if this wins it’s probably going to be a triumph of connections over quality.

A Friend of Dorothy

Our second short hails from the UK and is by far the short here with the most star power.  It features the British comedian Stephen Fry in a small roll and co-stars Miriam Margolyes (Professor Sprout from the Harry Potter movies) as an elderly woman who strikes an unlikely friendship with a black teenager from her neighborhood after he accidentally kicks a soccer ball into her backyard.  The elderly woman is named Dorothy but the title of course has a double meaning as the teenager in question appears to be queer, though they don’t entirely come out and say it.  The Dorothy here is erudite and has long been a patron of the theater and the teenager in question has done some drama at his school despite being pressured to focus more on sports, and it doesn’t take a genius to see that this is going in the direction of Dorothy encouraging him to chase his dreams.  These cozy stories of elderly people befriending teenagers and the generations coming to learn from one another are kind of a dime-a-dozen and I will say this is actually one of the more one sided friendships in scenarios, the teenager clearly gets a lot out of Dorothy but the movie doesn’t really have time to find Dorothy getting much from him except for basic companionship and assistance opening cans.  The film also has a somewhat awkward framing story where we learn about all of this in a flashback after Dorothy has died and the teenager is attending the reading of her will alongside her cartoonishly snobby and ungrateful grandson, and that does end a little bit differently than you’re anticipating but still kind of feels like a cliché.

C

Its Oscar Chances: High.  British films do tend to pretty good track record in this category, which might just be part and parcel with the fact that English language movies are at large have a lot of advantages here but this one in particular benefits from a lot of connections within the British film industry including and especially it’s too celebrity cast members.  Even without the inside baseball back scratching Miriam Margolyes it’s just generally pretty charming here and I could see people voting for the film to reward her.  More generally this is probably the short here that tells one of the more complete and straightforward stories and people just looking for something very traditional and uplifting will like it.  The fact that the majority of Academy members are actors and this is a movie partly about chasing your acting dreams will also help.  On the other hand it’s pretty sugary sweet, and some Academy members who vote in this niche category might want something a little more challenging.

Butcher’s Stain

The five films nominated in this category this year seem suspiciously apolitical, which is surprising given that two of the shorts last year could be said to have “met the moment” more closely than most of the movies this year (A Lien in particular is a movie that probably wishes that it come out a year later).  The one exception to this is the Israeli film Butcher’s Stain, which doesn’t deal with capital “P” politics necessarily but is clearly about the race relations in Israel as well as the heightened tensions of a post-10/7 world.  The film concerns an Arab-Israeli butcher named Samir working at a grocery store owned by white Israelis who gets falsely accused of tearing down a hostage poster that is hanging in one of the back rooms of the store.  This accusation wounds him; he’s been a loyal worker at this store who’s never done anything like that and yet he’s still being smeared and he becomes paranoid about who might have done this to him and why.  Clearly the film is interested in exposing some of the racism inherent in the Israeli society, which is admirable but I’m not sure that its take on the subject is terribly sophisticated.  For one, Samir is very much a “model minority,” one who seems to have been calibrated to be above suspicion in a way that seems almost patronizing.  I’m also inclined to say that the movie goes a little bit late on the racist store owners, who the film certainly judges for rushing to assumptions about their minority employee but the film never really seems to question whether firing someone over tearing down an inflammatory poster is grounds for firing in the first place even if guilty.  The film also isn’t quite sure where to leave us with all of this; the idea of Samir retaliating for all of this is seemingly not on the film’s radar and instead the movie just kind of leaves him in a place where injustice happens and life sucks and he kind of just can’t really do much about it… It’s a pretty deeply unhopeful look at Arab-Israeli life.  I don’t disrespect that necessarily, there’s a certain honesty to it, but it’s not that cinematically satisfying and doesn’t exactly point to much of a way forward for someone in Samir’s position beyond a sort of nihilistic acceptance of second class citizenhood.

B

Its Oscar Chances: Low.  Charts about the Israeli Palestine conflict are not uncommon in this category but they tend not to win.  That might be partly because most of them kind of take a similar template: layout human-interest peak at the life of a Palestinian and the indignities they suffer while not really getting to the core of the issue.  They tend to still be a bit too humanizing for the people who hate Palestinians, but too wishy-washy for the people with sympathies for the Palestinian cause.  This one’s a little different in that it’s about internal Israeli race relations more so than necessarily the occupation of Palestine, but it’s certainly not unrelated, and I think it would fall into the same trap.  Beyond that I think it’s just a little too muted and subtle to really stand out amongst the pack here and voters will be more attracted to the more conceptual and frankly gimmicky options on hand.

Two People Exchanging Saliva

Two People Exchanging Saliva is the most overtly “arty” of the nominees here: it’s French, it’s in black and white, and it’s kind of surreal.  The film is set in a alternate universe that more or less looks like our own world in terms of technology and what, but for whatever reason they were they’re living under a dystopia where kissing is illegal (punishable by death), people are obsessed with having bad breath, and for whatever reason rather than paying for things with money you are allowed to slap people repeatedly when you sell them stuff.  Along the way we follow a college aged girl who is living in this world who becomes slightly infatuated her boss, an older woman working at a department store who seems to become similarly infatuated with the girl and there’s some weird sexual tension there.  The whole situation including the department store is somewhat reminiscent of the movie Carol, so maybe this is about taking the unrequited desires of lesbianism up to an absurd level.  Of course outside of that connection Todd Haynes was not the first filmmaker to come to mind while watching this: the contemporary filmmaker is clearly most trying to imitate is Yorgos Lanthimos.  The strange kind of illogical rules of this world feel very much akin with a movie like The Lobster, although the laws here seem even more random than they do there, this almost feels more like something that would be imposed by the parents from Dogtooth but at a societal scale and the casualness by which the film introduces you to all these rules is also pretty in keep line with early Lanthamos.  I generally do like my Academy Award nominated short films to be trying wild stuff like this and on that level I respect the effort here but I don’t really think I vibed with it.  At 35 minutes it’s the longest of the shorts here by a good 10 minutes and it feels a bit repetitive at times (lots of scenes of that lady getting slapped to pay for things), and the overall point here seemed a bit elusive.

B-

Its Oscar Chances: Not High.  I want to be a little careful before dismissing this one’s Oscar chances, especially after what happened last year.  This isn’t actually that much like I am Not a Robot, which I wouldn’t have called particularly per say but that does signal that more conceptual foreign shorts might have a better chance here than they have in the past.  For one the film has an eye catching title which I find helps sometimes.  Also the film has some notable champions like Vicky Krieps (who provides some voice-over narration) and I’ve also seen notable lesbian Francophile Jodie Foster campaigning for the film in Q&As and the like.  It’s also probably going to be the most obvious choice if there is a “highbrow” bloc of voters for this category.  That said being weird and oblige is usually kind of a kiss of death in this category so unless trends really have changed I don’t necessarily see this happening.

Jane Austin’s Period Drama

Though you would think that live action short films would be a good medium for comedy that doesn’t tend to be what gets rewarded in this category.  Dark satires can make it through, and I guess stuff like The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar have an “in,” but they don’t seem particularly interested in rewarding shorts that feel like they might be at home on a sketch comedy show, and that’s pretty much what Jane Austen’s Period Drama is.  In fact if you told me it had aired on “Inside Amy Schumer” back in 2014 I would have believed you.  As you can probably tell from the title this is a broad parody of Jane Austen adaptations… one that involves menstruation.  I don’t want to give away too much of the joke but it involves an Austen protagonist having her monthly visitor at an inconvenient time and the confusion this causes for the overly proper man she’s with and absurdist comedy ensues.  And when I say this is a broad parody I mean broad.  The characters have names like “Miss Labinia Talbot” and “Mr. James Dickley” and the whole thing rests on a nutty exaggerated version of the pop feminist talking point that men are clueless about women’s bodies and that women are trained to be overly shy about them.  You could call it a one film, but given that it’s a short that’s not as much of an insult.  In fact running at only 13 minutes it’s easily the shortest movie and that was probably a smart decision because I could have seen this getting old pretty quick but it manages to quit while it’s ahead.  As accomplishments go this is pretty slight but I’d say it’s pretty good it was trying to be.

B

Its Oscar Chances: Decent.  These kind of “comedy sketch” shorts generally don’t win the big prize as voters tend to be won over by things that are a bit more modeling and quote unquote “important.”  However, this is another one that I want to be a bit more open to after the I am Not a Robot victory.  It (along with A Friend of Dorothy) is easily the most digestible of the nominees and it also has an eye catching title and it’s brief running time will make it easier people to catch it on Youtube or something in their free time.  It’s also executed film technically for what it’s trying to be, I claim it’s saying that you’d see on a sketch comedy show but it does have a bit more of a budget than that.  If they’re in the mood for laugh and they’re feeling kind of frivolous I could easily see a lot of people voting for this.  On the other hand comedy is subjective and some voters might just find this a little too juvenile for the Oscar.

In Conclusion: I would not say this is a very inspiring slate of nominees, to the point where I almost feel like I owe an apology to some of the previous slates.  Going by my letter ratings I guess Butcher Stain and Jane Austen’s Period Drama are the best of the bunch, but I have definitive reservations about both of those and would not necessarily call them Oscar worthy.  On the other hand I don’t think there are any particularly low lows here either; the other three nominees are all respectable enough and I feel like Two People Exchanging Saliva might have worked better for me on some other day when I was more in the mood for it.  Normally you get one English language movie nominated in a slate of otherwise dominated by foreign stuff and it’s a safe bet to just predict that one But that strategy failed last year and even if it didn’t it wouldn’t really help you this time around since there are three English language movies.  I do think your most likely winner is one of those three, and of those three I’d say A Friend of Dorothy is the one that is closest to what these voters usually goes for so that’s probably your winner if trends revert back to the mean this year, otherwise I could see Jane Austen’s Period Drama being a surprise upset, but I wouldn’t necessarily be gobsmacked if any of these won.