Oscar 2010: Documentary Short Subject Semi-Finalists

Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak (top); The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant (middle); China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province (bottom)

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced the list of eight semi-finalists in the Documentary Short Subject category for the 2010 Academy Awards. Three to five of those shorts will end up with Oscar nominations.

The eight films are listed below in alphabetical order by title, with their production company:

• China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province, Downtown Community Television Center, Inc.
• The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner, Just Media
• The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant, Community Media Productions
• Lt. Watada, Chanlim Films
• Music by Prudence, iThemba Productions, Inc.
• Rabbit a la Berlin, MS Films
• Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak, Outside Productions
• Woman Rebel, Women Rebel Films

Subjects range from interviews with parents who lost their children following the devastating Sichuan earthquake of 2008 (Jon Alpert and Matthew O'Neill's China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province) to the closing down of the General Motors assembly plant in Moraine, Ohio (Steve Bognar and Julia Reichert's The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant); from an examination of children's book writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak's thoughts, including his lifelong obsession with death (Lance Bangs and Spike Jonze's Tell Them Anything You Want: A Portrait of Maurice Sendak) to how rabbits stuck inside the confines of the Berlin Wall (or rather, walls) were affected after the Wall came down in the late '80s (Bartek Konopka's Rabbit a la Berlin).

Also, Daniel Junge's The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner shows how the former governor of the state of Washington led the campaign on behalf of the state's Death with Dignity Act, which allows assisted suicide; Lt. Watada is a portrait of US Army First Lieutenant Ehren Watada, who refused to fight in the Iraq War and got into some serious trouble for that reason; Roger Ross Williams' Music by Prudence looks at the Zimbabwe musical group Liyana and their lead singer, Prudence Mabhena; and Kiran Deol's Woman Rebel chronicles the stories of female Nepalese rebel fighters who have recently been running for public office.

The eight semi-finalists were chosen after voters from the Academy’s Documentary Branch viewed this year’s 37 eligible entries and submitted their ballots to PricewaterhouseCoopers for tabulation. (How many voters actually watched all 37 entries remains unclear.)

The 2010 Academy Award nominations will be announced on Tuesday, February 2, 2010, at 5:30 a.m. PT in the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills.

The 2010 Academy Awards ceremony will take place on Sunday, March 7, 2010, at the Kodak Theatre at Hollywood & Highland Center. In the US, it'll be televised live by ABC.