It’s the most romantic time of the year – the time where you can drag your closest friend or partner to not just one movie, but five sappy movies for the price of one ticket. That’s right, the Oscar-Nominated Live Action Shorts are back, and like every year they are quite the mixed bag.
This year there are no dreamy stars like Riz Ahmed and Oscar Isaac to gravitate toward, but “Le Pupille” is glossy enough, directed by Happy as Lazzaro’s Alice Rohrwacher and starring her older sister Alba Rohrwacher (The Lost Daughter, I Am Love). At 38 minutes it just barely qualifies to be a short film (40 minutes is the max), but it’s by far the easiest of the five to digest with its cheeky childhood antics and even cheekier nuns. It’s a slice-of-life Christmas farce, as sweet as the cake Serafina (Melissa Falasconi) dares to eat and unassuming enough for Disney+ to get behind it.
“An Irish Goodbye” is the only other feel-good short of the nominations, following a pair of brothers who set out to complete their late mother’s bucket list. Michelle Fairley of Game of Thrones fame narrates over a 23-minute vessel for a live-action re-creation of the Up montage, complete with multicolored balloons tied to an urn to lift it up toward the sky. “An Irish Goodbye” is nice enough – simple and kindhearted – but it’s also an odd man out amongst the shorts and feels like the voters were thinking back kindly to The Banshees of Inisherin when casting their nominations.
“Ivalu” and “The Red Suitcase” do the heavy lifting of the bunch, both through the perspective of a child. “The Red Suitcase” is the better of the two – director Cyrus Neshvad explores the fear a 16-year-old Iranian girl feels after she has landed in the Luxembourg Airport, where her much older husband awaits. The short starts off clunky, with a scene where airport security goes through her suitcase, packed with all the same tropes we’ve seen since 9/11, but once it moves past the familiar it molds into something much more intense and heartbreaking.
“Ivalu” is not as well-executed. Anders Walter (I Kill Giants) and co-director Pipaluk K. Jørgensen’s Greenland-set film is gorgeous to look at but clumsy with its storytelling. Based on the graphic novel by Morten Dürr and Lars Horneman, “Ivalu” has trouble balancing tragedy with hopefulness, relentlessly twisting the knife in an overt attempt at being a sob-into-your-tissue tearjerker. It falls flat, never managing to elevate the source material.
Perhaps the most perplexing of the five is “Night Ride,” which starts as a pleasant comedy that diverges into public service announcement territory (there is always one that gives off the PSA vibes, but this one is so wacky it’s baffling). A forced odd couple scenario, where a woman who hijacks a tram ends up being at the right place and right time to help a trans woman out of an abusive situation. “Night Ride” is about bearing witness and standing up for what is right, but at what cost? The short utilizes violence against a trans person to uplift its cis lead, which feels totally misguided.
While it’s rare for every title in the Oscar-Nominated Live Action Shorts to be a home run, this year’s crop is oddly shrug-worthy for the most part. It’s a shame, because short narrative filmmaking is one of the hardest mediums to excel at, and it’s always nice when you get the opportunity to watch a gem, but the Academy didn’t seem to find any this year.
This article appears in February 17 • 2023.