It's hard to find Academy Award-nominated animation during the run-up to the Oscars. I think there must be some technical requirements/expectations for the Final Five that make pre-Oscar Night showings tricky, unless you're close to one of the theaters participating in ShortsHD's program (which means not in Wyoming).
So as you can imagine, I was very surprised to see Konstantin Bronzit's "We Can't Live Without Cosmos" featured as part of The New Yorker's "The Screening Room" series. (This, paired with the fact that Don Hertzfeldt's "World of Tomorrow" is currently both a solid contender for the golden boy and streaming on Netflix brings me some hope that the yearly battle to find these shorts is gradually turning in our favor, but only time will tell.)
Now that I've seen it, it seems unlikely to beat out either Hertzfeldt's strange-but-wonderful fable or the 800-lb gorilla of Pixar and "Sanjay's Super Team." But it's charming and insightful and a bit sad all on its own, and I'm glad to have had a chance to see it before it fades into the background after The Big, Glamorous Night.
Here's a final suggestion from the folks at "The Screening Room:"
The idea for the film, he continued, had come to him in a dream, in the form of an image. That image “exists in my film almost in the very middle exactly, as it was in my dream.” He wouldn’t say which image it was.
At the core of Bronzit’s film is a contradiction. On the one hand, it revels in the intimacies of friendship; on the other, it’s about a solitary journey into the void. We want, and maybe need, both these things to be happy. I’ve watched “We Can’t Live Without Cosmos” again and again, trying to find the one image that expresses that contradiction. I recommend you watch it that way, too.