What’s Wrong With the Oscars is What’s Wrong With the World

Forget that Everything Everywhere All At Once won everything – including a script that used an everything bagel as a metaphor of nothingness. Forget that Maverick was nominated for Best Picture. And forget that Jafar Panahi’s No Bears – the best film of the year everywhere all at once – wasn’t even nominated for Best Foreign Picture.

Director Jafar Panahi in “No Bears.”

To understand what a mess the Oscars are – like this world – you only have to look at the winners in Best Shorts, Live Action and Animated. Sara Gunnarsdottir’s My Year of Dicks is a remarkably compelling feat in storytelling and animation and would qualify for the best animated short of the last fifty years.

The animation in My Year of Dicks is worth watching again and again

Charles Mackesy’s The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and The Horse is fine for a six-year-old (and perhaps anyone suffering PTSD) but is predictable and bland.

The difference is that Hollywood power brokers JJ Abrams and Woody Harrelson led the Mole crew, while a group of lesser-knowns – women too – helmed Dicks.

Meanwhile Berkeley and White’s The Irish Goodbye won Best Live Action Short over the far superior films The Red Suitcase and the Greenlandic entry, Ivalu.

Like The Boy and the Mole, The Irish Goodbye is predictable and bland. As remarkable as it is to have a lead actor with Downs Syndrome, that is no reason to award this prize.

Hollywood is exceptional at playing teary-eyed soundtracks of those we have lost. But when it comes to recognizing artistic talent and vision, and actually moving this damn society forward, the dream factory remains clueless. Like social fashionable movements such as Me Too and Black Lives Matter, it’s the show. And nothing else.

Oscars 2017: Best Live-Action Short

Oscars 2017 Best Live Action Short. This year’s Oscar nominations for Best Live-Action Short are all European: The Woman and the TGV (Switzerland), Silent Nights (Denmark), Time Code (Spain), Enemies Within (France) and Sing (Hungary). Oscars 2017: Best Live-Action ShortAnd while all have obvious merits, most fail at the short format, striving instead to be an abbreviated feature. Aske Bang’s Silent Nights is the most flawed in this regard – cramming in a passionate on-again-off-again affair, a mugging, death of a parent, deportation and sudden pregnancy into 30 minutes. Oscars 2017: Best Live-Action ShortTimo von Guten’s The Woman and the TGV, although entertaining and meticulously shot, suffers from a kind of Amelie envy. Best Live-Action ShortKristof Deak’s Sing and Selim Azzazi’s Enemies Within briefly focus on the key of the short format – that of a specific and intense relationship – but both lose focus in the end. Oscars 2017: Best Live-Action It is only Juanjo Gimenez’s Time Code – the shortest of the entries at fifteen minutes – that understands the structure of short films. Oscars 2017: Best Live-Action ShortIt delivers from beginning to end with humor and insight into the human condition while never overshooting its mark – people are happier when they accept themselves.