There was a rare tie at the Oscars on Sunday night, with The Singers (Netflix) and Two People Exchanging Saliva (Canal+/The New Yorker) both taking home the award for Best Live-Action Short Film.
Including this year’s, there have only been seven ties in Oscars history, the most recent being in 2013, when Skyfall and Zero Dark Thirty were both honored with Best Sound Editing. It has happened once before, though, in Live-Action Short, with the films Trevor and Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life sharing the award a little over three decades ago, in 1995.
Accepting on behalf of The Singers, director Sam A. Davis said, “Wow. I didn’t know that was a thing, a tie. But I’m happy to be up here.”
Davis went on to thank his parents, “who convinced a kid from Potterville, Michigan that this was a viable career avenue.”
He continued, “To our entire crew, but especially to these guys standing behind me, David Breschel and Jack Piatt, my producers, who willed this thing into existence. To our incredible cast of first-timers, people who had never acted before and never really imagined themselves on the big screen. Mike Yung is here, New York City subway busker. You may have seen him. Thank you to Netflix, to my girlfriend Paris, to the La Habra Moose Lodge, and of course to the Academy. Crazy sentence, I know.”
In closing, the filmmaker said “The Singers is a simple story about the power of music and art to bring us together in a moment when we live in an increasingly isolated world. May we keep looking for beauty in unexpected places, and may we all be brave enough to keep on singing.”
Between speeches, presenter Kumail Nanjiani joked, “Ironic that the short film Oscar is going to take twice as long.”
Filmmakers Alexandre Singh and Natalie Musteata then took to the stage to accept the other award on behalf of Two People Exchanging Saliva. “Thank you…We are so happy to be sharing this Oscar with The Singers,” Musteata said. “We love all of our fellow nominees and we’re so, so grateful to everyone who has supported our film and who made this film.”
She later said, “Thank you to the Academy for supporting a film that is weird and that is queer and that is made by a majority of women.”
Singh had his mic cut off, but was ultimately able to deliver most of his remarks. He thanked the Academy for “rewarding a French film made by a Franco-Indian Brit, a Romanian-American, an Argentinian, an Italian.”
Singh later alluded to “a world that is dark and absurd and ridiculous and horrifying,” saying, “that is why we make films, isn’t it? Because we believe that art can change people’s souls. Maybe it takes 10 years’ time, but we can change society through art, through creativity, through theater and ballet. And also cinema.”
The Singers centers on an impromptu sing-off in a bar, whereas Two People Exchanging Saliva explores a society where kissing is punishable by death, and people pay for things by receiving slaps to the face. Against this backdrop, the unhappy Angine shops compulsively in a department store and develops a fascination with a playful salesgirl.
Other nominees tonight in the Live-Action short category included Meyer Levinson-Blount and Oron Caspi with Butcher’s Stain (Tel Aviv University Steve Tisch School of Film and Television), Lee Knight and James Dean with A Friend of Dorothy, and Julia Aks and Steve Pinder with Jane Austen’s Period Drama. Of the winners in the category tonight, only The Singers‘ Davis had been nominated before, for his producing of 2023’s Nai Nai & Wài Pó.
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