Kickstarter at the Oscars

Sunday night is Oscar night. Millions of people will soon be filling out their Oscar pool ballots — and scratching their heads when they hit the short-film categories.

Let us help you with that.

Among this year’s nominees in the short-film categories are three Kickstarter-funded films: Kings Point and Inocente for best documentary short, and Buzkashi Boys for best live-action short.

This isn’t the first time that a Kickstarter project has been nominated for an Oscar — Incident in New Baghdad, Sun Come Up, and The Barber of Birmingham were nominated before — but it could be the first year a project wins. Roger Ebert called Buzkashi Boys, a coming-of-age story filmed in Afghanistan, “this year's strongest nominee in the category.”

Inocente and Kings Point are strong contenders in the documentary short category. Inocente tells the story of a 15-year-old homeless girl pursuing her dream of becoming an artist. Kings Point tells the story of six seniors living in a retirement community of 15,000. Both have received rave reviews.

The 558 people who backed these films’ Kickstarter projects will have a special rooting interest on Sunday. “People even said they now have a real reason to watch the Oscars,” Alexandra Blaney from the Inocente team told us. “I bet a lot of our Kickstarter backers are way ahead in their Oscar pools because they've actually seen one of the Short Doc nominees.”

Best of luck to all the filmmakers and their backers. We’ll be watching!