The documentary categories at the 98th annual Academy Awards honored a pair of films that turned the lens on matters of life and death.
“All the Empty Rooms” won the Oscar for best short documentary for its look into the lives of four children killed in school shootings.
Gloria Cazares, whose 9-year-old daughter Jackie was killed in the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting, accompanied the filmmakers on stage to accept the Oscar.
“My daughter Jackie was 9 years old when she was killed in Uvalde,” Cazares said. “Since that day, her bedroom has been frozen in time. Jackie was more than just a headline. She is our light and our life.
“Gun violence is now the No. 1 cause of death in kids and teens,” she said. “We believe that if the world could see their empty bedrooms, we’d be a different America.”
The best documentary feature went to “Mr. Nobody Against Mr. Putin,” a film about a school teacher in a remote part of Russia who began documenting the Putin administration’s campaign to control how the Russian public perceived the war against Ukraine.
“‘Mr. Nobody Against Putin’ is about how you lose your country,” said David Borenstein, who co-directed the film with Pavel Talankin, the teacher at the center of the story. “And what we saw when working with this footage is that you lose it through countless small little acts of complicity.
“When we act complicit when a government murders people on the streets of our major cities,” he continued. “When we don’t say anything, oligarchs take over the media and control how we can produce and consume it.
“We all face a moral choice, but luckily even a nobody is more powerful than you think.”
Talankin then spoke in Russian through an interpreter, saying, “For four years, we looked at the sky for shooting stars to make a very important wish. But there are countries where, instead of shooting stars, they have shooting bombs and shooting drones.
“In the name of our future, in the name of our future, in the name of all of our children, stop all of these wars now.”
The stars of “Bridesmaids” – Melissa McCarthy, Rose Byrne, Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph and Ellie Kemper – then came out to celebrate the 15th anniversary of that comedy and present the Oscars for best original score and best sound.
After a long but very funny bit in which they personified their characters with jokes and audience interactions, they announced that Ludwig Göransson won the Oscar for his score for “Sinners,” his third in that category after “Black Panther” and “Oppenheimer,” and the sound team for “F1” had taken the sound Oscar.