Who cares what we might think about the Oscar contenders for best short films? I’m not so sure I’m invested enough to write this, but with travels being so light this year, I don’t have much of anything else to share so why not this? Not to imply I’m not writing or doing stuff but those behind-the-scenes things don’t always warrant the granular microscope.

So here we were out in Peoria, Arizona, at 11:00 in the morning ready for nearly 6 hours of short films over the next 8.5 hours. First up were the documentaries and the first one was a bomb titled How Do You Measure a Year? about a father interviewing his daughter on her birthdays from age 2 to 18 that could only have been included for consideration due to a single answer that his daughter gives when she’s two years old and dad asks her what she thinks “power” is. She ultimately tells him that it’s “her vagina.” Subtitles tell you she had figured dad asked what “powder” is and her answer was about where to put it. Off on the wrong foot. While the idea is a nice gimmick of doing something for our children, it is not Academy Award material.

The Elephant Whisperers was better by a wide margin, allowing hope for the rest of the films yet to be seen. This short film shows an Indian couple raising an orphaned elephant in an elephant camp/reserve. Caroline enjoyed this film, but it was a bit too anthropomorphized for me. Also, this is yet another reflection that tragically, animals are being squeezed out of their natural existence and humans must become their caretakers if animals are to have a place in our world.

Stranger At The Gate, the next film, was beyond the pale of insulting. Ex-Marine bent on killing a bunch of innocent people dips into the local mosque to case the joint and finds god and community so he abandons his terroristic thoughts. WTF. The Martha Mitchell Effect was a good documentary about a kick-ass woman lost in the passage of time whose reputation is being rehabilitated after she was marginalized in the typical 1970s fashion that implied that strong women could only be crazy and hysterical.

Haulout, set in Siberia, looks at a colony of 100,000 walruses who must turn to land because there is no sea ice to haul themselves onto, which 10 years earlier was the norm. This is a small reflection of a remote situation where climate change is ruining environments and demonstrating that we humans are contributing to mass murder on an unfathomable scale.

Of the animation shorts up for Academy Award consideration none stood out other than one about a boy, a horse, a fox, and a mole that was so annoying, cloyingly sappy, and full of clichés that we should have walked out of the theater screaming in horror that such a POS was ever made. How in the world was Woody Harrelson involved with this tripe?

As with the other categories, there were 5 titles in the Live-Action Short films but I’ll only focus on the two real contenders in my eyes. They were Ivalu and The Red Suitcase and neither of them was an easy feel-good piece. Both films are gut-wrenching looks at the brutality girls are facing and both should be seen for the stark reminder of what we’d prefer to remain hidden from view. Ivalu tells the story of a young girl in Greenland, looking for her older sister who, we eventually find out, committed suicide after her dad had raped her, and The Red Suitcase follows a 16-year-old teenage girl arriving in Europe on a flight from Iran, clutching a red bag with her treasured art supplies and drawings. She had been sold as a wife to a 40-something-year-old, but by dropping her hijab she was able to slip by her would-be groom waiting for her at the gate. The tension of her nearly being caught before her final escape was riveting, but the film makes clear that this penniless girl who doesn’t speak any foreign languages is heading into an uncertain future, forced to leave everything behind, even her suitcase.