We’re counting down the days until the Academy Awards! We’ll be here, breaking down each of the 23 categories, talking a bit of history, and trying to figure out who is going to win all those gold statues. So check back throughout the next three weeks for Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars.
Best Live Action Short
The nominees are:
An Irish Goodbye
Ivalu
Le Pupille
Night Ride
The Red Suitcase
I love this category. Every year, some of the best films in contention at the Academy Awards are nominated in Live Action Short. Three of these – The Red Suitcase, Le Pupille, and An Irish Goodbye – are better films than half of the nominated features this year. Every year, I tell myself I am going to see more short films. I have been lucky enough for the past nine years to live in two cities – New York and Los Angeles – that actually play short films in theaters with some regularity.
It is a tremendous art form, and of all the categories I am happy to see back on the broadcast after last year’s debacle, this is the one I am most excited for. These filmmakers are craftspeople on par with any working at feature length, and of course, some of these filmmakers have made features, but the point stands. The shorts deserve attention and respect, and including them in the big show is the least the Academy can do.
Le Pupille – My wife found Le Pupille unrelentingly sad. I found it fun and hopeful, with just the right amount of sticking it to the man. This is only to say different people can come away with wildly different feelings about this film. What I don’t think is debatable is that director Alice Rohrwacher imbues this fable with just the right amount of reality to prevent the whimsy from becoming too saccharine.
The film tells the story of a group of young girls at a Catholic boarding school in Italy during World War II. The school exploits the girls for gifts from community members who come by to borrow their innocent souls for personal prayers. Much happens in the film’s 37-minute runtime, the longest of the group this year, and I will leave most of it to surprise. Suffice it to say, I found it charming and invigorating. Your mileage may vary.
An Irish Goodbye – Part of the Green Wave at the Oscars this year of Irish films hitting big with the Academy, including The Banshees of Inisherin and International Feature nominee The Quiet Girl. You may have seen the viral video of a theater full of folks in Ireland watching the nominations announcement and going wild with joy as each Irish nominee was announced. And if there is one thing you can say about this film, it is that it is quintessentially Irish, with pitch-black humor, a morbid fascination with death, and heart to spare.
Directors Tom Berkeley and Ross White tell the story of two estranged brothers, Lorcan, who has Down Syndrome and lives on the family farm with their mother, and Turlough, who moved away some time ago. When their mother dies, Turlough returns to attend the funeral and sell the farm. Lorcan wants to stay on the property and convinces Turlough to help take their mothers ashes around and complete the list of things she wanted to do before she died. It’s a sweet, gentle film with superb performances, and yeah, by the end, I was a little feckin’ misty-eyed.
Ivalu – This short from Danish filmmaker Anders Walter, based on the graphic novel by Morten Durr, follows Pipaluk, an indigenous girl in Greenland whose older sister goes missing. The style is elliptical and impressionistic right up until the last couple minutes when the film overplays its hand and reveals too much. Walter and co-director Pipaluk K. Jørgensen fail to trust their audience, and in so doing, they throw off the tonal balance of the short, which is so spot on for the first three-quarters.
It would be too much to call it an overt misstep since so much of the film is so involving, but it is a surprising miscalculation. Walter previously won this category in 2013 for Helium, a moving fable about the friendship between a terminally ill young boy and a hospital custodian. That was an excellent short precisely due to its subtleties and Walter’s masterful balance of tone. Ivalu falls just short in both those areas.
The Red Suitcase – Women escaping peril is a common plot for short-subject nominees. Just in the past 10 years, we have gotten Just Before Losing Everything, Everything Will Be Okay, A Sister, Take and Run, and now The Red Suitcase. Each of these films is excellent and each story unique, but every one of them takes as its central subject a girl or woman escaping from imminent danger. Something about it preys on an audience’s primal fear, and that kind of immediate tension is key to making a thriller work in such a short amount of time.
Cyrus Neshvad’s The Red Suitcase is a perfect example of this phenomenon, concerning a young girl who arrives at an airport to meet the adult man her father has sold her to for marriage. Her attempts to hide and flee make up the bulk of the film’s brief 17 minutes. We witness the escape entirely from her point of view, and as her options run out, we feel the tightening of the vise, not only from the situation but from her culture. One wishes these kinds of stories were not so prevalent, but as long as we are going to keep getting them, they should all be as expertly crafted as this.
Night Ride – This is the funny one. The funny one rarely wins, but it provides an interesting counterbalance to the sometimes heavy lineup in Live Action Short. Norwegian director Eirik Tveiten’s film follows the story of a woman with dwarfism who boards a commuter rail to get out the cold and accidentally starts it down the track while the conductor is away. Because she is at the controls, everyone assumes she is the conductor and treats her that way.
Meanwhile, a passenger hits on a woman who reveals she is trans, which angers the passenger and he and his friends threaten to get violent. Our lead then has to decide how she will use her newfound power as conductor to handle the situation. Because of the tone of the film, it never feels like anything too terrible is about to happen, but the stakes are very real, and it certainly seems true to the lived experiences of two people who have likely been othered their whole lives. It is ultimately sweet but a bit slight.
The final analysis
Any of Le Pupille, An Irish Goodbye, or Ivalu could win and it would hardly be surprising. An Irish Goodbye won the BAFTA award for best British short film, so there is precedent with a large voting body that shares a good chunk of its membership with the Academy. Walter is a previous winner, and voters may find the conclusion of Ivalu more satisfying than I did. But for the win, I think Le Pupille will be hard to beat.
Rohrwacher is a star on the international cinema scene. Her most recent feature-length narrative film, Happy as Lazzaro, won the best screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival in 2018, and in 2014, she became only the second woman in the history of the festival to win the Grand Prix (essentially second place) for The Wonders.
In addition, Le Pupille is produced by Academy favorite Alfonso Cuarón, who would make history if this film were to win. With this nomination, Cuarón tied Kenneth Branagh for nominations in different categories with seven. If he were to win, he would break a tie with Walt Disney for most wins in different categories. Disney won in all three short film categories and Documentary Feature. Cuarón has won Director, Editing, Cinematography, and International Feature.
Speaking of Disney, the last feather in the cap for Le Pupille is that the short is widely available on Disney+ and has the power of a major studio behind it, putting it in front of people and generally making the Academy aware of its existence and pedigree. As we have mentioned before with shorts, big names help, big money helps, and recognition helps. Le Pupille has all three.
Will win: Le Pupille
Should win: The Red Suitcase
Next time: Documentary Short
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