Taylor Swift, Kendrick Lamar, and More Big Names Have Shorts Officially Vying for Oscars Consideration

Marcus Jones
·3 min read

Who would’ve thought the Oscars to be the venue for a possible “Bad Blood” reunion? Former collaborators Taylor Swift and Kendrick Lamar, who are each musicians with Grammy wins in the double digits, are now both officially eligible for the Academy Award for Best Live Action Short.

On Swift’s end, she has already hired a consulting firm, THR first reported, to guide an awards campaign for “All Too Well: The Short Film,” the project she wrote and directed, which stars Sadie Sink and Dylan O’Brien, and is soundtracked to her No. 1 hit “All Too Well (Taylor’s Version).”

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The pop icon and budding filmmaker, who will soon be seen in the upcoming David O. Russell movie “Amsterdam,” screened her short for one week in November of last year at the AMC Lincoln Square in New York.

Swift also made an appearance at this summer’s Tribeca Film Festival, and talked to Oscar-nominated filmmaker Mike Mills about making the decision to pursue directing narrative projects in addition to music videos, saying: “I think I gave myself permission to completely make that jump into making a narrative short film because this is not a music video; we approached everything differently.”

Similar to Swift, Lamar made a short of his new song “We Cry Together” off the album “Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers.” The film, which sees the rapper opposite “Zola” actress Taylour Paige as a dysfunctional couple, had a much quieter theatrical run this summer, playing at the ​​Laemmle Royal Theater in West Los Angeles for one week in early June.

Swift and Lamar are not the only famous names with bids for the Oscars shorts race this year. On the documentary side, basketball star Jeremy Lin is the subject of a short titled “38 at the Garden.” Directed by newcomer Frank Chi, and executive produced by Lisa Ling, the film has already screened at this year’s HollyShorts festival in Hollywood, and will debut to streaming audiences on HBO on Oct. 11.

Meanwhile, tennis star Naomi Osaka is one of the executive producers on the documentary short “Mink!” from recent Oscar winner Ben Proudfoot. “Mink!” tells the story of the late politician Patsy Takemoto Mink, who was the first woman of color ever elected to the U.S. House of Representatives, and a co-author of Title IX: ground-breaking civil rights legislation addressing sex-based discrimination in schools. The series is a part of The New York Times Op-Docs series, and premiered in June. If “Mink!” is nominated for Best Documentary Short, Proudfoot would be the first filmmaker nominated to the category three years in a row.

The star-studded lineup of shorts vying for Oscar nominations comes on the heels of projects like “Dear Basketball” and “The Long Goodbye,” which won Oscars for two already established stars: the late basketball legend Kobe Bryant and actor and rapper Riz Ahmed.

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