The Oscars marked a victory for independent filmmakers.
The lowest budget indie film in the running for the major awards (at $6M), Sean Baker’s Anora, swept the show!
On top of that, the indie animated feature, Flow (budgeted at $3.7M), beat out Pixar’s Inside Out 2 ($200M) 🤯.
By the way, if you haven’t seen Flow, it’s on Max right now and it’s amazing. Am I biased because I have 3 cats? Maybe…
But in this issue, let’s talk about a less-examined selection of films at the Oscars – the live action shorts!
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How to Win an Oscar
Every year, AMC theaters screens the Oscar-nominated short films for anyone to go watch (thanks for the heads up Erik!).
There were 5 shorts in the running, all from different countries, all great displays of filmmaking.
But interestingly, 4 out of the 5 films were message-based films – all very political and tragic.
One of the films stuck out from the rest for being decidedly apolitical and funny. That film was I’m Not a Robot, and it’s the one that took home the Oscar.
Does that mean it was the “best” film? Or that apolitical films are what people want? Well, I think there’s a more simple explanation for why it won.
Academy voters love to cast their vote for a short that supports a cause they believe in or want to draw attention to. However, in this case, those votes got split among 4 equally tragic causes.
That means all the voters who preferred something more light-hearted, all cast their votes on the same film – I’m Not a Robot.
That’s not to say it didn’t deserve the win – I absolutely loved it.
But it just goes to show that all awards are incredibly subjective and have just as much to do with the other films in contention, current events, etc as the quality of your film.
So if your goal with a film is to win some trophies, you’d better give up on the idea of ever being able to control or “game” the system to optimize for that.
The same principle applies to film festival selection and awards by the way – which is where the nominations for Oscar short films originate. Sometimes festival programmers get 2 EXCELLENT films about squirrels in the same year. It would be weird to include both of them, so they don’t. Womp womp.
And unfortunately you’ll probably never know THAT’S the dumb reason you didn’t get in – you’ll just get the same generic rejection letter.
So knowing that the chips will always fall wherever they want to… just make the best film you can, the one that gets YOU the most excited – and don’t give any attention to the acclaim you hope it’ll receive.
By the way, if you want to see the Oscar winning short film, you can watch it here:
Favorites this week:
📺 TV: Enlightened (HBO)
Thanks to my parents for recommending this one. If you like Mike White’s work (The White Lotus), you’ll enjoy yet another depiction of a middle-aged character’s slow-motion train-wreck.
Laura Dern perfectly plays the type of woo-woo California woman you see a lot out here – so desperate to believe she’s fixed herself and evolved, while in reality hanging onto her sanity by a single (hemp) thread.
📹 Video: Technology isn’t fun anymore
From motion smoothing on TV’s to Venmo forcing us to see who paid their friend for Pizza everytime we open the app – Drew Gooden hilariously breaks down the constant enshittification of everything we buy and use in this modern world.
💬 Quote
“Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.” – Albert Schweitzer
Let’s make some movies.
-Kent