Worst to Best: The 2024 Oscar Shorts Nominees

A viewer's guide to the best, worst and least mediocre shorts on the Oscar ballot.

Images from ‘The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar’ and ‘Pachyderm,’ my two favorite Oscar shorts. Let’s will them to victory.

Last year, I did a ranking of the three Oscar shorts categories—Live Action, Documentary, and Animated—as both a viewer’s guide to the programs currently circulating arthouses this time of year and a cheat sheet for awards pools. On the latter font, I fell a little iffy in my prognostication: I was correct in believing the worst animated film (“The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse”) would win, but I was not cynical enough to believe that the worst live-action film (“An Irish Goodbye”) would also win. And though I was right in predicting one of two animal docs had the edge, I picked the more artful “Haulout” over the more accessible “The Elephant Whisperer.” The worst shorts in Live Action and Animation are so bad that I have trouble summoning the pessimism to pick them to win, and the Documentary shorts are so uniformly mediocre that all five of them have a shot. (To express my displeasure, the “best” are locked in a four-way tie for fourth.) 

But we’re not about awards here, right? We just want to see some good movies. And there are a handful of them worth checking out below: 

Best Live Action Short Film

5. “The After” (dir. Misan Harriman, 18 min.)

Perhaps the worst short in all three categories, “The After” opens with a tragedy that would be leveling if it weren’t so preposterously staged and then mopes its way through the grieving process until it gets to a cathartic release. The end. That’s all, folks. It’s a small relief that the impossible job of redeeming this shamelessly manipulative exercise falls on the capable shoulders of David Oyelowo, playing a London executive who loses his wife and daughter in a flash of violence and emerges a year later as a lonely man with a beard who drives a rideshare around the city. His despair is so deep that “The After” seems like it might develop into something like Abbas Kiarostami’s A Taste of Cherry—which honestly doesn’t sound appealing, either—but his final ride in the film makes it a lot more straightforward. 

4. “Red, White and Blue” (dir. Nazrin Choudhury, 24 min.) 

It is unflattering to “Red, White and Blue” that it recalls Never Rarely Sometimes Always, Eliza Hittman’s harrowing drama about a teenager from rural Pennsylvania who journeys to New York City to have an abortion. But there’s certainly room for a similar story post-Dobbs v. Jackson and the bluntly titled “Red, White and Blue” offers one in following a waitress and single mother (Brittany Snow) who scrapes together enough tips to drive from Arkansas to Illinois to find a legal clinic. Some of the details are suitably galling—the tension of heading north in a shitty car on dwindling cash, a waiting room packed with women forced to cross state lines as if they’re buying fireworks—but the short hinges on one serious howler of a twist. I may need optic surgery to roll my eyeballs back in place. 

3. “Knight of Fortune” (dir. Lasse Lyskjær Noer, 25 min.) 

You could fairly knock this Danish comedy-drama for its sentimental treatment of grief, but with “The After” also on the live-action-short docket, “Knight of Fortune” looks like Carl Dreyer by comparison. There’s a slight groaner of a twist here, too, but it’s prefaced by the sad and lightly comedic bond between two like-aged strangers who are struggling to say goodbye to their dead wives at a morgue. In this unpleasant place, lit by the sickly yellow of fluorescent lights, mourners are escorted into a private room with a coffin, which they are then encouraged to open to make peace with their dearly departed. These two men, who meet in adjoining bathroom stalls, help each other through the process, but when another family arrives for a session, there’s some confusion over who’s related to who. The answer is a bit tidy, but the actors sell it.