It’s not often that Caroline and I spend nearly 9 hours drifting between theaters, but when we do, you can be assured it’s for the Academy Award Shorts. Not participating with local media, it can be tricky to catch when local events are happening, but here we were, having caught sight of that time of year when the animated, documentary, and live-action shorts up for Academy Award consideration are bundled together and screened over an entire day.

You might ask, what does this photo of a mall have to do with movies? Well, let me tell you. Harkins at Fashion Square Mall in Scottsdale is where we took in these movies, and between the groupings of five films, we’d walk around the mall. I’m not going to attempt to review 15 films, especially after a great start with the animated films, each a winner, only to crash into the documentaries where we watched a man die on the street and deal with another going to his execution in a Texas prison and finally a film from a survivor of the Parkland, Florida, mass school shooting. The best part of it all, during the animated films, we were warned about sexually mature content that arrived in the form of a minuscule puppet penis, but when the documentaries rolled, there was no warning that we’d watch a man bleed out. In America, penis is too provocative, while a man dying in the street is just part of the violence to which we should be numb.