Oscar Judging Starts This Weekend, Follow Along with Our Exclusive Award Tracker
Oscar season is officially upon us. Starting tomorrow in Los Angeles, the Academy’s Short Films and Feature Animation Branch Reviewing Committee will spend two days viewing all the eligible entries in the best animated short film category. The following weekend, Academy members in New York will perform the same task.
This voting will result in a 10-film shortlist that will be announced in November, followed by a second round of voting that will determine the five short nominees.
So what shorts will the Academy members watch? Cartoon Brew has been tracking all year the short films that have qualified in our exclusive Awards Tracker, a first-of-its-kind resource for the animation community. We made our final update to the list earlier today. A few notable last-minute additions: the French short Au fil de l’ eau by Dominique Monfery, the director of Disney’s Destino, and Stripy by brothers Babak and Behnoud Nekooei, which marks one of the few times a short from Iran has qualified.
The qualifying films were compiled by using the Academy’s own list of qualifying festival awards (available in this PDF) as well as individual filmmakers telling us directly if they’d completed the one-week Los Angeles theatrical run process.
The list currently has 55 films on it, which is pretty close to the 58 that qualified in the category last year. Here’s the thing though: Even though a film qualified through a festival win doesn’t necessarily mean that the filmmaker completed the necessary qualification process. On the other hand, other films may have qualified that don’t appear on the list because filmmakers can qualify a film through the aforementioned one-week theatrical run. In those instances, we have to rely on individual filmmakers to communicate with us directly.
Even with these caveats, we believe the list of films is as accurate as it can possibly be and contains all of the major contenders for the category this year. We also hope that making the list available to the general public helps showcase the diversity and quality of animated shorts that are being produced annually and draws greater attention to our oft-overlooked corner of the Academy Awards.