It’s not easy to win attention in the Oscar and Bafta shorts categories, but Screen speaks to the campaigners who are taking on the challenge.
Campaigning for short films in an awards season dominated by starry, big-budget features is no easy task. “People just don’t take shorts as seriously,” admits one documentary short awards strategist. “They don’t pay as close attention to them, and the press just don’t have the bandwidth to cover them.”
Still, the challenges do not stop a cadre of publicists and strategists from toiling each year to get films into contention for Academy Awards in the animated short, documentary short and live-action short categories, and for the Bafta Film Awards in the categories of British short film (documentary and live-action narrative projects) and British short animation.
The first challenge is qualifying. To be eligible for the Oscars, a short must either have had a seven-day theatrical run in one of six US cities, have won a qualifying award at one of 170-plus Academy-approved festivals, or have won a gold, silver or bronze medal in the Student Academy Awards.
Besides passing a British nationality points test, qualifying for the Baftas requires screening at one of 50 specified festivals for animated shorts and two of nearly 90 festivals for live-action and documentary shorts.
When it comes to voting, the US Academy allows different groups to vote (if they watch the required number of entries) in different categories during its shortlist and nomination phases: all Academy members can opt in for both phases of live-action shorts voting; members of the animation and short film branches can vote on the animated shorts shortlist, while all Academy members are invited to pick the nominees; and documentary branch members can cast ballots in both phases for documentary shorts.
For the Baftas, members of the organisation’s shorts chapter can vote in the preliminary longlist rounds for British short film and British short animation but specialist juries decide on the longlists and nominees in each category.
The Bafta and US Academy rule books also have a bearing when it comes to awards season strategising. Bafta regulations include an outright prohibition on “campaigning of any kind” in either of the shorts categories, and entrants must inform the organisation if they even hire a publicist during awards season.
“They are very strict, and we adhere to their guidelines,” says Catherine Lyn Scott, CEO of London Flair, the UK-headquartered PR company that has worked on Bafta and/or Oscar-winning live-action shorts including An Irish Goodbye, The Silent Child and The Long Goodbye. “You can’t campaign, you can’t talk to voters, you can’t do anything other than press. You can do a screening and invite press, but you can’t invite voters.”
Strategists and publicists have more campaigning options with the Oscars. Los Angeles-based publicist and festival programmer Kathleen McInnis of See-Through Films suggests that in the first phase of Oscar season, before shortlists are revealed in mid-December, the cost of campaigning is prohibitive for emerging filmmakers.
“Getting press coverage for shorts in phase one is next to impossible unless you have a celebrity attachment,” she says. “So we’re trying to help them with their social media and accessing screening and advertising deals – driving the conversation about who the filmmakers are and what the film is about.”
In the second and third phases of Oscar season, after the publication of the shortlists and the announcement of nominations about five weeks later, paid advertising in industry trade publications and elsewhere becomes more important, say publicists, and press interest is easier to generate.
While campaigners never know which members of the relevant Academy branches have opted in to view and vote on short films, official Academy email blasts to members of a specific branch, or to the entire membership, are “well worth doing,” argues Scott, “because that’s the official way to get in front of voters.”
The frequency with which Academy mailers can be sent is restricted, however, and the cost of hiring professionals to do that can be a stretch for short films with limited campaign budgets.
Finding the audience
Perhaps the most important strategy for campaigners is simply to get short films seen. Awards voters can view contending shorts in the US Academy’s online screening room, on the Bafta View private platform, or even on Netflix, when the global streamer makes one of its occasional buys of shorts during awards season.
But in-person screenings – sometimes followed by filmmaker Q&A sessions and increasingly held in international locations to reach the Academy’s now more international membership – have a greater impact, suggest some campaigners.
“Shorts don’t have the massive exposure that features have through theatrical releases and global campaigns,” points out Benoit Berthe Siward, CEO of The Animation Showcase, the London-based strategy agency that has handled projects including 2025 animated short Oscar winner In the Shadow Of The Cypress and 2025 Bafta British short animation winner and Oscar nominee Wander To Wonder. “So for us, it’s about making sure that films are being seen by the industry.”
Festivals – from Sundance and Cannes to specialised events such as Annecy International Animation Film Festival and Palm Springs’ ShortFest – provide plentiful screening opportunities for shorts. Most useful are the events, such as the recent London extension of Los Angeles’ HollyShorts festival, that fall during awards season.
Private block screenings, offering several shorts from different categories or handled by different publicists, can help entice voters out of their homes and allow the participating companies to split costs.
Screening sessions for employees at big-name companies can also be a good way to expose shorts to likely Academy branch members and potential voters. The Animation Showcase, for example, which also operates its own streaming platform reaching almost 100,000 industry professionals, spends September to mid-November staging awards season screenings of five or more shorts each at the campuses of animation powerhouses such as Laika, Pixar, Disney and Netflix.
Towards the end of awards season, the films still in contention get some rare public exposure in the Oscar Nominated Short Films programme distributed annually to around 600 North American cinema screens by UK-based streaming service ShortsTV.
Campaigning for short film awards, with its international scope and email blasts, does not come cheap. Publicists and strategists report that campaigns can cost anything from a few thousand dollars for a handful of Academy mailshots, through $5,000-$10,000 for a typical push, to as much as $100,000 for a full-service blitz.
But short filmmakers – those with films that reached the latter stages of awards season, at least – suggest the cash outlay, time and effort are worth it. “More people saw the film and more people now know what I do,” says Nina Gantz, the London-based Dutch director of stop-motion Wander To Wonder – which won several awards on its journey to 2025 Bafta and Oscar success.
The awards validation “gave me a lot of confidence”, adds Gantz. “It will also give people who might invest in my next film confidence that these darker films can work for a bigger audience.”
Adam Graves, US writer/director of 2025 Oscar nominee Anuja, a live-action short about child labour in India, sees awards success as “wonderful icing on the cake. But what it really is is a springboard to get your film seen by more people.
“It definitely helps your career as a filmmaker,” adds Graves. “I have representation, I’m talking to financiers about various projects, I’ve got a feature that I’m gearing up to make. It’s opened a considerable number of doors for me.”
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