'Oscar Nominated Shorts 2021: Animation': Film Review

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In his 92 years, African-American businessman Horace Bowers Sr.—one of the two main subjects of the Oscar-nominated short documentary A Concerto Is a Conversation—has faced many obstacles in his path. He’s always found a way around them.

When Judy Heumann—one of the main subjects of the Oscar-nominated documentary Crip Camp—was five years old in the early 1950s, her mother tried to register her for kindergarten in New York City. The staff took one look at Judy, who used a wheelchair as a result of polio, and denied her.

Darius Marder’s Sound of Metal went into 2019’s Toronto International Film Festival without a distributor. Now, a year-and-a-half on, it’s a six-time Oscar nominee and perhaps the most hard-fought of all of this year’s crop of Best Picture candidates. Joe Utichi meets Marder and stars Riz Ahmed and Paul Raci to take stock of a film that transformed its key players in ways they hadn’t expected.

EXCLUSIVE: Following its Oscar nomination, Elvira Lind’s short film The Letter Room has been racking up the sales. The movie, which stars Oscar Isaac and Alia Shawkat, has sold to France and Germany (ARTE France), Spain (Telefonica), Denmark (TV2), Russia (Shot TV), Poland (New Europe Film Sales), Airlines (JetBlue) as well as an international deal with Kanopy for the educational circuit.

Despite previous outrage that streaming service Netflix could have films nominated for Oscar Awards, this year the site has proven once again that its movies can play with the big boys.

The Oscar-nominated filmmaking team behind the documentary Time are looking forward to a reunion at Union Station in Los Angeles, the main venue for this year’s Academy Awards. Director-producer Garrett Bradley and producers Lauren Domino and Kellen Quinn haven’t seen each other in person for a while, because of Covid-19.

In the Oscar-nominated documentary short A Concerto Is a Conversation, acclaimed composer Kris Bowers traces a line from his family history to the premiere performance of his original concerto "For a Younger Self" at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2019. Following that line is Horace Bowers Jr., Kris Bowers' 91-year-old grandfather, who sits down with his grandson to tell the story of his journey out of the Jim Crow-era South in the pursuit of his American Dream.

For his Oscar-nominated animated short film, Opera, director Erick Oh wanted to create an animation that captured the essence of human history. The looping cycle style of animation was ideal for the story he wanted to tell, which Oh attributes to the cyclical nature of history.

Dead children, democracy being crushed, senseless Nazi atrocities —there's not much happiness in this year's collection of Oscar-nominated short documentaries, unless you count the man who actually survived racism and homelessness to become a proud, successful grandpa. Each of these long "shorts" finds protagonists to root for; some contain seeds of hope; all boast polish and relevance that make them awards-ready.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticThose who typically scope the Academy Award-nominated shorts programs hoping to win the Oscar pool will have a particularly tough time of it with this year’s animated roster, as the options are wide-ranging but lack a clear frontrunner. A few of the talents have ties to Pixar, though only one short was actually developed at a studio, while the other four are far more personal, independent expressions with little in common, least of all technique.

Imprisonment, in many senses of the word, is at the center of each of the five nominees for this year's live-action short film Oscar, which is not to say they're a homogenous bunch: Though all have political undercurrents and speak to present-tense issues, their moods and styles vary enough that their one big (mostly) common theme —cops, and how they wield power —stands out only because we've already been thinking about it every day for what feels like forever.

Peter Debruge Chief Film CriticLaw and order, and the lack thereof, were impossible to ignore amid last year’s “defund the police” protests, and the same tensions are reflected in the Oscar-nominated live-action shorts lineup. Some of the entries predate the George Floyd killing, while another was shot in direct reaction to that tragedy last summer; two more were made abroad, on opposite sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, touching on themes that transcend borders.

Laika is expanding into the world of live-action filmmaking for the first time, with an adaptation of John Brownlow’s upcoming debut novel, Seventeen.

Gallery: She grows what?! 10 things you should know about Oprah Winfrey (BANG Showbiz)The 'Mamma Mia!' actress - who has Nina, three, and Thomas, six months, with husband Thomas Sadoski - didn't get much sleep the night the nominations were announced because she was so "excited and anxious", while she admitted being recognised by The Academy "deepens [her] clarity" that she chose the right career path. Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, she said: "I'm in Georgia.

Andra Day — correction: Best Actress nominee Andra Day — couldn’t be more excited. ET spoke with the star following news of her Oscar nomination Monday to get the details on how she first learned she was nominated and what this recognition means to her. “When I looked at my phone I saw that it was full of messages,” she shared about first realizing she was nominated.

That’s something we really need now, when so many countries are dealing with manipulative, corrupt and incompetent politicians.”Also Read: 'Collective' Named Top Documentary at Cinema Eye Honors“Collective” follows a team of Romanian journalists in the aftermath of a 2015 nightclub fire that killed 27 people.