Oscar Shorts

Former NBA basketball player Kobe Bryant won an Oscar?! Yes, it’s true, and you can see the four-minute, animated film Dear Basketball and the nine other live-action and animated shorts that were nominated for an Academy Award earlier this year at Texas Public Radio’s next Cinema Tuesdays event. Along with Bryant’s short, which was based on a letter he wrote for The Players’ Tribune in 2015 about his retirement from basketball, the other animations are Garden Party, featuring frogs and toads hanging out in an abandoned mansion; Negative Space, a stop-motion short about a father and son bonding over packing the perfect suitcase; LOU, Pixar’s entry about a lost-and-found box with a mind of its own; and Revolting Rhymes, based on poetry by late author Roald Dahl. On the live-action side of things, the screening will include Oscar winner The Silent Child, which explores deafness from the perspective of a little girl; De Kalb Elementary on a school shooter; The Eleven O’Clock on a psychiatrist and his delusional patient; My Nephew Emmett on the 1955 Emmett Till murder; and Watu Wote: All of Us on a group of Muslims who protected a Christian woman during a bus ride in eastern Africa.