2016 Oscar-Nominated Short Films: Live Action

Anguish pervades the majority of this season’s nominated live-action shorts, sometimes with tragic results. With the exception of the clash of cultures in Basil Khalil’s irreverently delightful “Ave Maria,” each film features characters struggling to cope with difficult situations that are sometimes of their own making. A reclusive English typographer with a speech impediment agonizes over meeting an online romantic interest for the first time in Benjamin Cleary’s “Stutterer”; an Afghan-American military translator on her first day on the job faces a life-and-death situation for which she’s not prepared in Henry Hughes’ “Day One”; two Albanian boys in Kosovo (circa 1998) find their friendship challenged by the vagaries of war in Jamie Donoughue’s “Shok”; a divorced German father deceives his young daughter during a weekend visitation in Patrick Vollrath’s “Everything Will Be Okay.” Of those four live-action shorts, the last two include admirable performances by youngsters who carry the films’ emotional weight skillfully. While their merits vary (for example, the ending of the otherwise charming “Stutterer” is a tad too pat, while the last minute of the deeply affecting “Shok” – the title is the Albanian word for “friend” – is both a heart-stopper and heartbreaker), all four entries deliver on their own terms.

For a change of pace, different worlds comically collide after a collision between a broken-down car and a statue of the Virgin Mary begins “Ave Maria,” the current odds-on favorite to win the Oscar. Set in the West Bank, the short film is a sly observation about how to bridge religious and cultural differences by bending the rules a little, featuring an Israeli settler family eager to get home on the Sabbath and the five Palestinian nuns practicing a vow of silence who help them do so. There are a couple of laugh-out-loud moments that make the chaos all worthwhile. (Why the wordless sisters have a telephone is just one of the sweet absurdities here.) It’s a welcome respite in a field of contenders that otherwise trade on anxious drama.