The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have announced the nominees for the 91st annual Academy Awards, to be given out during ABC’s televised ceremony on Sunday, February 24. The Oscars will cap off a months-long awards season featuring industry veterans, newcomers, and as always, endless debates about who deserves to go home with the golden statue.
New York Film Academy (NYFA) takes a closer look at this year’s Academy Award nominees for Best Documentary Short Subject:
Black Sheep
Black Sheep is a look at Cornelius Walker, the son of Nigerian immigrants who dealt with traumatizing racism while growing up in London, and who attempted to deal with that racism by trying to assimilate into his white neighborhood. Notably, the 26 minute-long film is mainly a single close-up of Walker, interspersed with reenactments. Director Ed Perkins has mostly shot documentaries, including Chutzpah and If I Die on Mars. This is his first Oscar nomination.
End Game
The Netflix short End Game is 40 minutes long, the maximum length an eligible film can be for the Documentary Short Oscar. The film centers on palliative care providers and terminal patients in the San Francisco Bay Area and was directed by Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. Epstein has won two Academy Awards for the feature documentaries Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt and The Times of Harvey Milk, though this is first nomination in nearly thirty years. This is the first nod for Friedman, who co-directed Common Threads. The pair also directed the Allen Ginsberg biopic Howl, starring James Franco.
Lifeboat
Lifeboat follows Sea-Watch, a German nonprofit that looks for stranded refugees in the Mediterranean Sea, over the course of a single day in 2016. The 26-minute-long film gives a look at the desperate migrants fleeing North Africa for Europe. This is the first Academy Award nomination for director Skye Fitzgerald, who also directed the documentaries Bombhunters, Finding Face, and 101 Seconds.
A Night at the Garden
A Night at the Garden is a seven-minute-long haunting look at archival footage from a pro-Nazi rally held at Madison Square Garden in New York City on February 20, 1939. Appropriating themes of American patriotism, 20,000 audience members attended the event, supporting Third Reich ideals for the United States on the eve of World War II. Director Marshall Curry has been nominated for the Oscar twice before, for the Documentary features If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front and Street Fight, which followed the 2002 mayoral campaign of now Senator and presidential candidate Cory Booker.
Period. End of Sentence.
Period. End of Sentence. explores the cultural taboos around menstruation in India, where many women don’t have access to the same quality hygiene care found elsewhere. The 26-minute-long film focuses on a low-cost, easy-to-use machine that manufactures sanitary pads invented by entrepreneur Arunachalam Muruganantham, an advocate of women’s rights in India. This is the first Academy Award nomination for director Rayka Zehtabchi, who also directed the short narratives Madaran, We Home, and Shnoof.
Check out the New York Film Academy Blog after this year’s ceremony for a full list of the 2019 Oscar winners and losers!