Oscars 101: Best Live Action Short Film

In which I run down on the nominees (and likely winners) of the Academy Awards.

Continuing our foray into short films, we arrive at the Live Action Category.  If anything, this is even more obscure for casual movie-goers than the animated one, since Disney and/or Pixar - whose shorts are at least widely seen - usually have an entry into the field, but there's no mainstream equivalent for live action.  This year's nominees are:

Aya
Boogaloo and Graham
Butter Lamp
Parvaneh
The Phone Call

This year's nominees are an eclectic group of international films.  They are all European (at least in part) and two are French co-productions (with Israel and China respectively).  Unlike the animated category, which is favored by shorter and comparatively more enjoyable films, their  Live Action equivalents are more closely aligned with the structure of a one act play: often closer to the 30 minute mark, but with all of the emotional weight of a feature length production.

Aya - More than any of the other nominees, Aya feels like it should be a feature length film.  Through a series of mishaps, a woman picks a stranger up from the airport instead of his professional driver and decides to drive him to his hotel.  Along the way they talk about music, the dubious merits of following your heart and whatever happened to his actual driver.

Their road trip is awkward - certainly - but also revealing, heartfelt and earnest.  The film grants equal weight to both characters: not just the serendipitous whimsy that caused Aya to drive a complete stranger around Jerusalem, but also the music researcher who finds himself abducted  by a total stranger.  I would love to see its creative team channel their success and increased notoriety into fleshing this out into a feature length production.

Boogaloo and Graham - Without a doubt, Boogaloo and Graham is the funniest film that I have seen from 2014: feature length or otherwise.  The film details the misadventures of two Irish brothers after their father gives each of them a pet chick (the titular Boogaloo and Graham).  Growing concerned about their parents intentions for their pets, they swear off meat entirely (except for sausages and burgers) and decide to become chicken farmers.

I've said it again and again that the strength of any child-centric film is the performance of its child actors.  The script can be as well-written, the adult actors as talented and the final production as well directed as anything else, but the film's worth will rise and fall with its youngest cast members.  Riley Hamilton and Aaron Lynch are two exceptional young actors who maintain the quality of the rest of the film: providing pitch-perfect performances as the young boys whose only concern if for the fate of their pet chickens.

Butter Lamp - Of the prospective Oscar winners, Butter Lamp is the least exciting.  That's not to say that it's bad at all, or even that it's wholly lacking.  It's just that it's an obtusely written art film that thinks itself far more profound than it actually is.

The film is shot as a series of pictures, with a photographer carefully staging, dressing and directing rural villagers in front of a procession of increasingly urban backdrops.  The end of the film - in which a cask of butter from one of the villagers is left on a stool in front of the actual backdrop of the film (a half-constructed highway cutting through a brilliant mountain landscape) - is supposed to say something deep and profound about the disappearance of isolated, rural ways of life in the midst of the constant procession of modernity.  It's intelligent, if unengaged, and not likely to win much of anything.

Parvaneh - Like Butter Lamp, Parvaneh is a socially conscious film with big things to say about modern urban life and those that do not necessarily fit into it.  Unlike its competition, however, it features an engaging narrative with well-rendered characters and a driving plot.  Unlike Butter Lamp, it tells a story.

Parvaneh is a young Afghan girl living and working illegally in Switzerland, saving up her meager pay to pay for a doctor for her parents back in the Middle East.  When she is unable to send the money home through Western Union, she bribes a local girl to do it for her.  The two girls spend the night together, grow as friends and find something in the other that they were unable to find anywhere else.  It's a touching, if coldly told, story, but loses out to much more engaging films.

The Phone Call - This British short film is without question my favorite of the nominees.  It features engaging characters, an excellent cast (which includes Sally Hawkins and Jim Broadbent) and makes brilliant use of its abbreviated running time, making every single second be felt with equal weight.

Heather, who answers phones at a crisis call center, gets a call one day from a distraught man.  Grieving for his late wife, he overdoses on pills and calls for the sole purpose of not being alone at the end.  It is undoubtedly the most emotionally draining of the nominees, as we listen to a depressed man die in real time, knowing that there is absolutely nothing that anybody can do to stop it.

Safe Bet: The Phone Call

Long Shot: Boogaloo and Graham

Longer Shot: Aya

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