Ranking the Oscar Nominated Shorts: 2012 - 2021

Welcome to a very special edition of the Best Animated Short blog. We are still a few weeks away from the Academy Award ceremony, where the Best Animated Short category has been relegated to second class status. Yet it is also the 90th year where the Academy has a category for Best Animated Short. Which means it's time for me to pull out an old favorite from when I was going back in time reviewing the nominated shorts: I'm going to rank the Oscar nominated films from the past 10 years by how much I enjoyed them.

If you've been reading my reviews over the past ten years you'll know that at the end of each review I rank the shorts by quality and by preference. However, both of these metrics are incredibly subjective, and quite frequently how much I enjoy a film goes a long way by how good I think it is. There are certainly times where I can recognize the artistry into a film I didn't really like, but they almost never claim the top spot in rankings by quality. Anyways, when I have to go back over the 50 short films that were nominated in the past ten years, I think it's easier to solely rank them by preference. That is what I did with my eight previous entries, and that is what I'm going to do here.

This edition is going to be different in certain ways from the eight previous rankings that predated this one. For those I had almost all of the films available to me in some fashion, and I was able to make those rankings every ten reviews, which usually took a few weeks. For these 50 films I had to wait for the Academy to announce their new sets of nominees, and to do that for ten years. That means a lot more time for my tastes to change and evolve than with my previous reviews, especially since there are several of these films that I haven't seen since I wrote the review in their respective years. I have watched all of the films again to make these rankings, so yes, there will be some discrepancies between my rankings in the individual reviews and this one. 

And also, just because a film is ranked low doesn't necessary mean I hated it. There are just that many more of the nominees I liked more than it. I think it is a testament to how well the Academy had been doing in formulating these nominees. It's just a shame that they would relegate this category to secondary status. Anyways, as in previous entries, I will be writing small blurbs about each film that will get longer and longer until they become mini-reviews. I hope you're getting all settled because here we go.

Hair Love wins Best Animated Short

Well, I admit that this post is two days late. Oscar night was fairly busy for me. Heck the entire past weekend was busy, what with me attending a pony convention north of Dallas, spending time traveling to Houston to meet Randy Johnson, and then returning to DFW to hang out with friends before the end of the weekend. In fact, I was having supper when the Best Animated Short category was announced. But if you haven't already noticed the winner for this year was Hair Love.

Best Animated Short - 2019

Well, it has been a week since the Oscar nominations were announced, and as I had wrote, I saw three of the nominated films just from scouring the internet for the shortlisted films. For the first five days I checked frequently for the last two without much success. However, everything changed over the weekend. First, Daughter got posted onto Vimeo. It was posted by somebody whose name doesn't appear at all in the credits. Given the fact that it's been removed I have a feeling it was an unauthorized leak. And then I stumbled across a Vimeo post of Memorable, one that was posted almost ten months ago by the production company Vivement Lundi. I could have sworn it was not there every time I looked, which suggests that it was set on private for a while, but it had been made available for public view. So yippee, I've now seen every nominee in this category this year, and 368 of the 369 nominees in the category's history. 

*shakes fist at Rippling Romance*

But now that I have seen all the nominees, I must drop all of the plans that I had for tonight to bring you...my review. And then I can go back into hibernation with the exception of posting which of these five films had won the Oscar.