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Oscar 2019 Winner Predictions: Documentary Short

By the end of Period. End of Sentence., woman after woman muses that she’s actually the stronger sex, and who in the Academy would dare argue otherwise?

Period. End of Sentence
Photo: Netflix

As Ed pointed out yesterday, we’re in the middle of “a year where every AMPAS wing is taking to a film that in some way—confrontationally, naïvely, or otherwise—to how America is backsliding on race by the day.” Like BlacKkKlansman, Marshall Curry’s seven-minute A Night at the Garden, which consists entirely of footage from a little-known pro-Nazi rally that took place in New York’s Madison Square Garden in early 1939, explicitly depicts the parameters of that descent by linking the past with the present.

During the rally, German American Bund political leader Fritz Kuhn addressed a crowd of 20,000, sarcastically denigrating the media’s coverage of him, whipping the crowd up as a protester storms the stage and is dragged away by nationalists and police officers. Though terrifying throughout, Curry’s presentation restricts its intertitles to describe only the events depicted, and so A Night at the Garden’s on-the-nose “Do you see?!”-ness ends up triple-underlined. It’s hard not to imagine even the most receptive audiences being well past the point of being worried fascism can happen here again. We know. It’s here already.

So what of the ways the rest of the world is backsliding on race? Is it worth pointing out that Liam Neeson is, at the end of the day, an Academy member, and likely not an atypical one? Ed Perkins and Jonathan Chinn’s Black Sheep is, in this slate, both the most easily digestible statement on racism and also the most stylistically sentient. But even more importantly, it tackles the subject in the manner that Oscar voters and Nick Vallelonga clearly find the most useful: by downplaying the societal and instead focusing on the personal.

And since the prejudice depicted in the film is British, not American, one could see at least a few American voters being relieved at the chance to reward anti-prejudice sentiment for once without having to put it through the Woke-O-Meter. All snark aside, Black Sheep—which depicts mostly through flashback how a Nigerian boy responded to white prejudice by wearing blue contact lenses, internalizing racism and becoming his worst enemy—is a pitch-perfect Errol Morris emulation, even if that approach works best when there are other talking heads adding to the question of truth or fiction. And, like previous also-rans The Reaper and Last Day of Freedom, it may be too aestheticized for the room.

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Far more straightforward are a pair of nominees that revisit topics already covered in this same category two years ago. Skye Fitzgerald and Bryn Mooser’s Lifeboat is a redux of 4.1 Miles, reporting on marine rescue attempts amid the migrant crisis—in this case focusing on mainly Libyan asylum seekers. The footage in 4.1 Miles was a great deal more harrowing, even if Lifeboat seems to be making a deliberate choice to show only one successful rescue mission, albeit bookended by shots of the waterlogged bodies of those who weren’t as lucky.

Meanwhile, End Game, which revisits the ethical and spiritual questions surrounding the end-of-life care previously covered in Extremis, boasts the Oscar-winning pedigree of Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman. While Extremis struck a fine balance between inquisitive and empathetic, End Game seems to have more plates spinning than it knows what to do with, and the perspective winds up skewed heavily toward one patient and how her understandably indecisive family members weigh palliative options. That focus comes at the expense of all the others on their deathbeds, to say nothing of the matinee-idol doctor who lost three limbs and is now trying to help terminal patients establish “a relationship” with death.

In the same sense that the unambiguous you-go-girl-ism of RBG will likely carry it to a win in the feature documentary category, the winningly well-meaning Period. End of Sentence. feels the most like a winner in 2019. As the title coyly suggests, it details the efforts of a group of Pakistani women to produce and sell their own biodegradable sanitary pads and fight against the stigma of menstruation. Rayka Zehtabchi and Melissa Berton depict their subjects soaking up a lot of cultural baggage but staying remarkably resilient while they break down outmoded superstitions. And despite the preponderance of giggles they’re met with by townspeople, compassion and unwavering medical seriousness carry the day. By the end, empowered and gainfully employed, woman after woman muses that she’s actually the stronger sex, and who in the Academy would dare argue otherwise?

Will Win: Period. End of Sentence.

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Could Win: Black Sheep

Should Win: Black Sheep

Eric Henderson

Eric Henderson is the web content manager for WCCO-TV. His writing has also appeared in City Pages.

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