You’ll find two of the finest films nominated for an Oscar this year in this category. One, “Incident,” which is stitched together from body-cam videos and other footage that captured the 2018 shooting of Harith Augustus in Chicago, is a less esoteric work than you might expect from director Bill Morrison, but it locates political resonances within that footage that make it as powerful as Dawson City: Frozen Time. By the time Morrison juxtaposes the different video feeds on the screen at the same time, he’s already presented a horrifyingly unambiguous picture of the racial bias that informs police shootings of Black suspects.
No less provocative is Smriti Mundhra’s “I’m Ready, Warden,” about the redemption that convicted murderer John Henry Ramirez seeks ahead of his execution by the state of Texas. The film empathizes with the regret felt by Ramirez, but it’s most powerful for the way it sits, and literally so, with the grown son of the man Ramirez killed as he not only grapples with whether or not he can forgive Ramirez but also comes to finally accept what he’s always known: that Ramirez’s state-sanctioned murder will not bring him any sense of relief or closure.
The majority of Oscar pundits are picking “Incident” or “I’m Ready, Warden” to win this, but we think another short will benefit here from enough voters finding Morrison’s efforts to not amount to much of a heavy lift, and Mundhra’s act of empathy to feel like too tall an ask. And that short could be “Death by Numbers,” Kim A. Snyder’s incredibly moving documentary about Samantha Fuentes, a survivor of the 2018 Parkland high school shooting. Fuentes was shot by Nikolas Cruz while she was in her Holocaust studies class, and by the time Snyder delves into the Nazi ideology that motivated Cruz, the short’s timeliness couldn’t be any more striking.
Notwithstanding the hope for humanity that Fuentes’s agonized words to Cruz emanate at the end of “Death by Numbers,” the short is still as harrowing as “Incident” and “I’m Ready, Warden,” and history tells us that voters will break for a lighter or more unambiguously inspirational film if given the option. And if that proves to be the case this year, there’s no better choice than Molly O’Brien’s “The Only Girl in the Orchestra.” (The vision of togetherness offered up by the similarly music-focused “Instruments of a Beating Heart” is practically a rebuke of the American project, but as a testament to the power of art to lay the groundwork for healing, it’s also somehow quieter and more didactic on the same point than O’Brien’s film.)
“The Only Girl in the Orchestra” centers on Orin O’Brien, a double bassist who became the first woman to play in the New York Philharmonic in 1966. O’Brien is also the daughter of actors George O’Brien and Marguerite Churchill, meaning that the Netflix-backed film has a very AMPAS-friendly connection to the movie business: It abounds in footage from her parents’ films (including Sunrise and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon), and it also allows us glimpses of O’Brien hobnobbing with B̶r̶a̶d̶l̶e̶y̶ ̶C̶o̶o̶p̶e̶r Leonard Bernstein. Fully immersed in the joys and honor of the creative pursuit, the short celebrates a woman whose talent is as laudable as her humility.
Will Win: “The Only Girl in the Orchestra”
Could Win: “Death by Numbers”
Should Win: “Incident”
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