In film…

The Oscars are coming up soon and the best films nominated this year aren’t in any of the major categories. As Noah Gittell outlines in his reviews of the Oscar Nominated Short Films 2016: Animated and Live Action, the year’s best cinema is in the category most often over looked at the annual Academy Awards. The live action shorts, with films like Alles wird gut (Everything Will Be Okay) and Stutterer, “will put you through the emotional ringer,” but they’re nonetheless rewarding. The animated shorts “deal with similarly painful subjects—death, grief, children suffering—but their mood is lightened by the whimsical possibilities of their form.”

In galleries…

For years, Colby Caldwell has been creating pieces based on an accident. The themes in “how to survive your own death,” his latest show at Hemphill Fine Arts, may be something of a reprise, but as Kriston Capps notes in his review, “While Caldwell may not be done printing these bit-works, he has finally finished them, in a sense, by marrying them with his ‘nature morte’ series, by sussing out the patterns—and the noise—that surface in natural selection and techno abstraction alike.”