Movie Log 2006 #21-30: Oscar-Nominated Shorts
I have now seen all but one of the shorts nominated for Oscars this year. The only one not on the Film Center progam was the live-action The Last Farm.

Briefly, starting with docs:
"The Death of Kevin Carter: Casualty of the Bang Bang Club" - Profile of the title figure, a war-zone photographer in late-Apartheid South Africa and later Sudan. Haunted by the images he snapped, including a controversial photo of a starving, crawling Sudanese child stalked by a vulture, he took his own life months after winning a Pulitzer. Interesting, but felt slight.

"God Sleeps in Rwanda" - Easily the best of the bunch, despite flat narration from Rosario Dawson. Profile of several women who survived the Rwandan genocide. One mother raises her daughter, a product of rape, after all her other children were killed. A 12-year-old finds herself the head of the household. Another woman is one of the first female police in the country. It's a safe guess that this subject will become the new Holocaust in the documentary category in coming years.

"The Mushroom Club" - A look at Hiroshima 60 years after the bomb. The Peace Garden is noisy, black trucks drive around spouting nationalist rhetoric, and many of the dwindling number of survivors refuse to attend the official remembrance ceremonies.

"A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin" Interviews with and reminiscence on Corwin, a radio playwright and poet.

PREDICTIONS: Rwanda. Corwin's got Old Hollywood appeal, so it's a dark horse, methinks.

"Badgered" and "The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation" - I saw both of these at last year's Chicago Film Festival. The first is the most crudely rendered, but is funny. Plus I saw the director in October, and she's an adorable Scot who'd be fun to see win an award. So I'm pulling for her. The latter is a tedious exercise in onscreen therapy. I expect student shorts to mostly be about blaming parents for screwing up lives, but this was from a 30-plus-year career animator.

"The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello" Overlong but nifty steampunk tale, told mostly in silhouette.

"9" - hard to describe plotwise, but had a nice look to the CGI. A frontrunner.

"One Man Band" - A Pixar entry that had lush looking backgrounds, but was too reminiscent of Tin Toy, I thought.

PREDIX: "Jasper Morello" or "9".

Live-action:
"Ausreisser (The Runaway)" - apparently this is a frontrunner, but I didn't care for it all that much.
"Cashback" - Night-shift supermarket workers kill time. Saw this at the 2004 Chicago Film Festival. It's quite good, but the cheesecake factor might turn off voters.
"Our Time Is Up" - Takes the dying-person-turns-new-leaf trope and applies to psychiatry. Some big laughs, but maybe a little to familiar to win. Nice to see Jorge Garcia from Lost.
"Six Shooter" - dark-comic Irish short. A guy greiving the death of his wife takes the train home and meets a very odd loudmouth passenger. Has a good chance, I think.

PREDIX: "Ausreisser" or "Six Shooter."