Every year, the Oscar shorts categories seem to exist in their own universe on the night of the big show. The films competing there aren’t recognized anywhere else; compared to the features nominated after months of campaigning, they haven’t been widely seen, coming in with very little public awareness. But hidden gems lurk in these lineups, many of which can be accessed on streaming and all of which are playing, in presentations divided by format—live action, documentary, and animation—in select theaters. Seek out these titles, and it’ll be worth it.

A guide to Hollywood’s biggest races

This year, one title in particular doesn’t exactly need that visibility boost—and as such, it’s altered the chemistry of how the shorts races usually play out. Nominated among the live-action crop is The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar, Wes Anderson’s starry, dizzying Roald Dahl adaptation that had the benefit of a full Netflix awards push and a splashy fall premiere in Venice. Its trajectory mirrors that of the streamer’s biggest overall contender, Maestro.

Constructed like an ornate cinematic pop-up book and starring a vibrant Benedict Cumberbatch in the titular role, Henry Sugar didn’t get a nomination solely because of its pedigree—Pedro Almodóvar’s equally A-list short, Strange Way of Life, was snubbed despite a robust campaign from Sony Pictures Classics. But as voting expands to the entire membership of the Academy, it can’t be denied that its relative popularity may make all the difference. In fact, as my colleague Richard Lawson points out on this week’s Little Gold Men (listen above), this may offer a test of the Oscars’ willingness to honor Anderson, a director they’ve been cold toward for much of his career. (Anderson’s latest feature, Asteroid City, landed on many critics’ top 10 lists and fared well at the box office, but received no Oscar nods.) Because only those who attest to having seen every short nominee can vote on the live-action category, you get a smaller—and quirkier—batch of Academy members that may yield surprising results. 

It helps that the whimsical Henry Sugar stands in stark relief against other films in competition, many of which are rather grim watches. Red, White and Blue follows a single mom (Brittany Snow) who must cross state lines to access a safe abortion; Invincible imagines the final 48 hours of the life of a 14-year-old boy (Léokim Beaumier-Lépine) detained in a center for troubled youth; and The After examines personal tragedy through the experience of a rideshare driver (David Oyelowo) in London. Some of these are more effective than others—the polemical undercurrent of Red, White and Blue, for instance, adds some weight to that story—but by the time you get to the lovely Knight of Fortune, about a widower at a morgue, its deft intermingling of humor and grief lands like a bittersweet palate cleanser.

Similar levels of dourness typically spike in the documentary category, but this year the nominated films offer more variety. The beautifully lensed and richly drawn Last Repair Shop feels the most complete of the bunch, giving viewers a poignant window into a long-standing Los Angeles public school system effort to provide refurbished musical instruments to students. The story is told from the perspectives of both those who work for the program and those (read: kids) who benefit from it most. It’s simultaneously emotional and informative, a typically winning Oscar combo here. 

Other issue-driven options include The ABCs of Book Banning, helmed by industry icon Sheila Nevins and featuring a premise rather plainly stated in its title, and The Barber of Little Rock, a portrait of a barber and community banker vying to improve the socioeconomic circumstances for his Black neighbors in Arkansas’s capital. They may triumph if viewers connect with their topics, though the presentation is less cinematic. By contrast, the essayistic Island in Between and warmly intimate Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó deliver fascinating and moving slices of autobiography from their filmmakers, but pack less of a clear punch when it comes to impact. That’s not a comment on quality, by any means, but the Academy tends to prefer straightforward messaging here.

The gulf between artistic and educational may be most pronounced in the race for best animated short, though, which I suspect will come down to two wildly different films. That’s no knock on the innovative Our Uniform, which in just seven minutes beautifully explores its Iranian director’s complex relationship to the hijab, or the charmingly crafty Ninety-Five Senses, in which Tim Blake Nelson joins the writer-director team behind Napoleon Dynamite for a kind of shaggy reconstruction of the human sensual experience. (The final nominee, Pachyderme, is also sweet but slight.) But the saccharine War Is Over! Inspired by the Music of John & Yoko draws blunt contrasts between combat and kindness that feel tailor-made for a sentimental win that’ll have critics throwing their hands up in frustration. And on the (far) other end of the manipulation spectrum, there’s no easy takeaway from Letter to a Pig, a hauntingly hand-drawn tale of a Holocaust survivor’s story told to a group of kids about the pig that saved his life. 

Letter to a Pig is ambiguous, unwieldy, affecting, and singular. But while this is the same voting body that just bestowed groundbreaking nominations upon The Zone of Interest, a similarly avant-garde reflection on World War II, that Lennon-Ono message of “can’t we all just get along?” certainly goes down easier (with, I’d argue, a less pleasing aftertaste). When it comes to the shorts this year, the Academy, for once, has some big names to sift through. We’ll soon see whether they’re too big to deny.