Furthermore, the winner is a high-stakes, highly timely and controversial short.
“Two Distant Strangers” won the Academy Award Sunday for Best Live Action Short Film, demolishing American entries “Feeling Through” and “The Letter Room,” just as Israel’s “White Eye” and Palestine’s “The Present.”
“Today, the police will kill three people. And tomorrow, the police will kill three people,” said writer and co-director Travon Free, noticing that all things average, police murder three individuals day by day and that, “disproportionately,” those victims are Black. “I just ask that you please not be indifferent.”
The movie, likewise co-directed by Martin Desmond Roe, is a polarizing take on “Groundhog Day,” except instead of a weatherman learning out how to mollify, it’s about a youthful Black man who keeps reliving his murder because of a white cop.
“There’s no way to avoid the fact that the reality of being Black is often painful and traumatic,” Emmy winner Free said this week in defense of his film — which has been called “more triggering than thought-provoking.”
In spite of the fact that every competitor is emotionally charged in its own specific manner, “Two Distant Strangers” is uncommonly timely.
The Oscars came less seven days after the fatal police shooting of 20-year-old Daunte Wright, and only days after the homicide conviction of previous Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin, who is white, for the 2020 killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man. The day Chauvin was sentenced, Columbus adolescent Ma’khia Bryant was lethally shot by a cop as she evidently went at someone else with a knife.
The following day, Andrew Brown Jr. was fatally shot by police in North Carolina.