When it comes to this year’s Oscars, “short” seems to be the buzzword.
Just look at all the controversial decisions the academy has made over recent months in pursuit of a shorter Oscar telecast. Some of these ideas have been quickly withdrawn, like reducing the amount of best-song performances, though the academy continues to cling to its latest unpopular move of presenting four categories during commercial breaks.
While those acceptance speeches will be edited into a montage shown later in the broadcast, the plan has still drawn fire from directors, editors and cinematographers whose films would be affected. But if the academy is so determined to trim the Oscar ceremony to the categories the general public is most invested in, isn’t it time instead to have a conversation about whether the three short-film Oscars should still be part of the main show?
You know these categories, even if you rarely know the nominees. The Oscars for animated short film, documentary short and live-action short comprise one-eighth of the awards given on a traditional telecast, and it’s here that most Oscar pools run into choppy waters and the show itself often founders.
Aside from the occasional animated short that runs before a Pixar or Disney film, these works are practically unknown to the average viewer, and many of them get no meaningful theatrical distribution until they can be packaged as a collection after the nominations are announced. So why do they still take up a big chunk of the Oscar show?
I don’t mean to denigrate the accomplishments of filmmakers who toil in this medium, though this year’s group of nominees happens to be an awfully homogeneous lot. (Many of the animated shorts are about parents taken for granted, while most of the live-action shorts follow young boys caught in a vortex of violence.) I understand that making short films is hardly lucrative, and at least the Oscar telecast can provide a glamorous reward.
Still, these categories are an island unto themselves, whereas a nominee from any other race — be it an animated feature or a foreign-language film — can conceivably vie for best picture or at least be eligible for other Oscars. If there are categories that have to go, these three provide the cleanest cut.
While the short-film categories have existed for decades, they originated at a time when it was commonplace for shorts to receive meaningful theatrical play. (This is why “Tom and Jerry” episodes have seven Oscars.) But that simply isn’t the case anymore, and the majority of short films can only qualify for Oscar consideration if they win specific film-festival prizes or if their directors rent out a Los Angeles theater for at least three days, a form of distribution that is done under the radar and makes little sense.
The path to awards qualification makes it hard for even the most invested fans to catch these movies, and so little time is spent on the Oscar broadcast to show us what the shorts are like that they can’t truly entice us. So if the academy is determined to retain these three categories, why not give them their due in a separate event dedicated to short filmmaking?
This is what that organization has done with the honorary Oscars, which are now awarded in a lavish event months before the main show. If the academy created a similar ceremony for the short films, they could potentially play in full in front of an industry audience, and the winners’ acceptance speeches need not be made in haste. It could become a must-see stop on the way to the main Oscar telecast (which the short-film nominees could still happily attend), and it would make the big show much more coherent, since all the awards left on the Oscar broadcast would pertain to feature-length filmmaking.
Though this idea may seem like a no-brainer, the academy has spent decades resisting attempts to re-evaluate the short categories. Thirty years ago, the board of governors voted against a recommendation to remove them from the Oscar telecast, which The Los Angeles Times reported then was suggested “as a way of trimming a show that usually runs longer than three hours and that has been steadily sliding in the television ratings.” (Sound familiar?)
And though the governors from the short-film branch would seem to be an easily outvoted minority, the academy is a highly political group, and the case has been made to various branches over the years that if the short films go, categories like cinematography would be next. Paradoxically, the races for cinematography and live-action short are both caught up in this year’s commercial-break dragnet, though the former would almost certainly be safe if the latter went untelevised.
If the academy is determined to make big changes to the broadcast, then, shorts remain the obvious place to start. Relocating them may prove controversial within the board of governors, but in a year when the Oscars are willing to offend some of Hollywood’s most peaceable figures (including Lin-Manuel Miranda and Ron Howard) by breaking with tradition, shouldn’t this modest proposal at least be on the table?
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.