The short films “Affairs of the Art” and “On My Mind” will compete in the Best Animated Short and Best Live Action Short categories at the March 27th ceremony.
Affairs of the Art” and “On My Mind,” a pair of short films released by The New Yorker, were nominated for Academy Awards on Tuesday morning, joining feature-length nominees that included “The Power of the Dog,” “West Side Story,” and “Belfast.” The nods for “Affairs of the Art” and “On My Mind” make them the ninth and tenth New Yorker films to receive Oscar nominations. The 2022 ceremony will take place on March 27th, in Hollywood.
Nominated in the Best Animated Short category, “Affairs of the Art,” directed by Joanna Quinn and Les Mills, presents an off-kilter, warm-hearted glimpse into a family of eccentrics. Beryl, a Welsh housewife and the film’s energetic narrator, is “drinking from the cup of creativity” as she shares her interest in drawing and recounts the parallel obsessions of many of her family members, who transform their own passions—toy trains, pet pigeons, revenge—into art through the power of their attention. Quinn and Mills have been making films about Beryl since 1987—“Affairs of the Art” is the fourth—and both won Emmys, in 1999, for their work on an animated adaptation of “The Canterbury Tales.” Quinn’s work has been nominated for an Academy Award once before, for the 1996 animated short film “Famous Fred.”
“On My Mind,” written and directed by the Danish filmmaker Martin Strange-Hansen, is nominated in the Best Live Action Short category and unfolds in a nearly deserted bar, where a man asks to perform a karaoke song with deeply personal meaning. “On My Mind” will début on newyorker.com later this year, and marks the second Academy Award nomination for Strange-Hansen, who won in the same category, in 2003, for the film “This Charming Man.”
Both “Affairs of the Art” and “On My Mind” are part of The New Yorker’s Screening Room, a series that showcases fictional short films from around the world. The magazine also presents the New Yorker Documentary series, featuring a new film on a critical issue each week. Like all New Yorker films, “Affairs of the Art” can be watched on the magazine’s YouTube channel, where you can subscribe and receive a notification each time a new film is added.
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