Worst to Best: The 2025 Oscar Shorts Nominees

Our annual ranked list may not give you an edge in Oscar pools, but there's still plenty of good films to see here.

My three favorites (clockwise): ‘Incident,’ ‘Wander to Wonder,’ ‘The Man Who Could Not Remain Silent’

For the last three years at The Reveal, I’ve pored through the 15 films nominated in the three Oscar shorts categories—Best Documentary Short Film, Best Live-Action Short Film and Best Animated Short Film—in an effort to survey the landscape and help all of us get an edge in office awards pools. But as you will notice from the 2023 and 2024 editions of this list, my prognosticating skills leave much to be desired: I’m two for six, in part because my cynicism about the Oscar voters, who would never reward an arch Wes Anderson short like “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” (which won) and would of course fall for a piece of schmaltz like “The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse” (which also won), has led to mixed results. 

As usual, there are not only worst-to-best rankings in individual categories, but the strength of the categories themselves are ranked here, with the documentary shorts coming out on top. All five of the docs are quite good this year, so if you can only choose one program to watch as the shorts tour arthouses this month, make it nonfiction. (It’s also the longest at 159 minutes, so you get plenty of bang for your buck.) Also of note: Two of the animated films, “Beautiful Men” and “Wander to Wonder,” feature stop-motion puppet men walking around pants-less. One more would make it a trend. 

All three shorts programs are currently circulating the U.S. and Canada via ShortsTV. Details here. 

Best Documentary Short Film

5. “Death By Numbers” (dir. Kim A. Snyder, 33 min.)
The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida on February 14th, 2018 was notable for the immediate mobilization of students who lost 17 of their classmates and had no tolerance for any “thoughts and prayers” bullshit. Among the most prominent of these survivors-turned-activists was Sam Fuentes, who was shot in the thigh and who still contends with lingering trauma, even as she presses fiercely for political change. “Death By Numbers” draws heavily from her journals, as she prepares to testify in the shooter’s sentencing hearing. The Parkland shooting has not been neglected by the documentary community—After Parkland, Parkland Rising, and Snyder’s Us Kids are just the most prominent features—but footage of Fuentes speaking to the perpetrator directly in court is, as the young people say, fire. 

4. “I am Ready, Warden” (dir. Smriti Mundhra, 37 min.)
One important subplot in “Death By Numbers” is a jury’s (and Fuentes’) consideration of the death penalty for the Parkland shooter. That issue is front-and-center in “I am Ready, Warden,” too, which catches up with a Texas inmate on death row for stabbing a man outside a convenience store. John Henry Ramirez committed the crime when he was 19 and immediately fled to Mexico, where he lived for four years and had a son before he was finally captured and convicted. “I am Ready, Warden” finds him at the end of his appeals after many years and three stays of execution, now resigned to his fate and genuinely contrite about his actions. Director Smriti Mundhra creates an affecting dialogue of sorts between Ramirez’s reflections in his final days and the pain and anger still lingering in the victim’s son, who lost his dad when he was a small child. The film is about saying sorry when forgiveness isn’t expected or perhaps even possible. 

3. “The Only Girl in the Orchestra” (dir. Molly O’Brien, 35 min.)
In 1966, Orin O’Brien became the first woman ever to join the 104-member New York Philharmonic Orchestra, which was under the direction of Leonard Bernstein, who referred to her double bass as “source of radiance.” Other press clippings at the time were less enlightened, with one calling her “as curvy as the double bass she plays” and another quoting a musician who claimed he couldn’t perform with an attractive woman. Yet “The Only Girl in the Orchestra,” a loving and lovely portrait by her niece Molly, isn’t merely about O’Brien as a feminist trailblazer but about a singular and lifelong passion for music, as well as the specific joy of collaboration. There’s no such thing as a double bass soloist, so O’Brien spent a career “in the belly of a submarine,” bringing sturdiness and order to the sounds pinging around her. Her life as a teacher and mentor seems to have the same blissful harmony. 

2. “Instruments of a Beating Heart” (dir. Ema Ryan Yamazaki, 23 min.)
Proportionality is such a vitally important part of short-form filmmaking, because too many shorts wind up feeling like truncated features, biting off too big a piece of the pie. (See: Three-fifths of this year’s live-action nominees.) To that end, “Instruments of a Beating Heart” is a determinedly minor pleasure, elegantly tracking the efforts of soon-to-be-second-graders in Japan to serenade the new first graders with a performance of “Ode to Joy” on drums, cymbals, triangles, and bells. Yamazaki follows one little girl in particular who successfully auditions for the cymbal but goes through the emotional process of preparing under an exacting conductor. The poor kid’s confidence on stage is certainly not unearned.