For years, one type of film has dominated the Best Documentary Short Subject category: a serious, issue-oriented doc that deals with tragedies or social injustices and runs close to the 40-minute limit.
That single-minded focus on the part of doc-branch voters can make watching all of the nominees a sobering experience, and a lengthy one: This year's five animated-short nominees have a total running time of 53 minutes, but their doc counterparts total nearly three hours.
And in an indication of just how major a force HBO is in the doc world, and just how adept it is at qualifying television movies for a film award, the cable channel almost always has a hand in a good number of the nominees (and often buys the ones it didn't already have after the nominations come out).
I've said this before, but feel compelled to say it again: There's a lot more happening in the short-doc world than dead-serious films about social ills. Year after year, the Academy does a disservice to some of the best and most adventurous filmmaking by nominating one kind of film almost exclusively in this category.
This year's nominees deal with the Civil Rights movement, the war in Iraq, the tsunami in Japan and a wave of disfiguring attacks on Pakistani women. (The fifth breaks the mold; it’s about an actress who made Elvis movies and then became a nun.)
Two of the films were made for HBO, and at least one of the others has since been bought by the company. Two, surprisingly, only run around 20 minutes, but the others all approach the 40-minute mark.
In this category, it's worth remembering that the film that wins is more often than not the film that leaves viewers with a sense of hope. Searing indictments of societal wrongs get nominated, but the ones that are uplifting are the ones that take home the Oscars: "Strangers No More" last year, "Music by Prudence" the year before, "Smile Pinki" the year before that.
By those standards, and given that this is a seemingly thin field with three nominees that just don't feel fresh or substantial enough to turn win, this year appears to be a two-horse race.
This roundup of the doc short nominees concludes TheWrap's three-day survey of the three shorts categories.
Also read: Oscar's Live-Action Shorts: The Europeans Are Coming
Also read: Oscar's Animated Shorts: Zombies Are Out for Pixar's Blood
"The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement" (photo above)
Robin Fryday and Gail Dolgin
The shortest of the nominees at less than 19 minutes, "The Barber of Birmingham" deals with a subject beloved by doc-branch voters: the Civil Rights movement of the early 1960s. The focus this time is on the struggle to register African-Americans to vote in the South, and in particular on the average men and women – the "foot soldiers" – who made up the bulk of the movement.
