"Black Sheep" is a British 27-minute documentary short film from 2018 directed by Ed Perkins and this is also an Oscar nominee this year. I have several problems with that already. First of all I am struggling with the word "documentary" in this context. The film includes messily put-together and edited interviews as well as poorly reenacted scenes. The interview parts are all with one person only, namely Cornelius Walker. This is his story. Or at least we are supposed to believe so. The way he presents it honestly it felt really scripted to me, also with his non-verbal language. There is nothing left to coincidence in this movie at all, but yeah that must not mean it is not all true admittedly. I don't know. Probably only Walker knows the percentage of what actually happened the way he describes it in here. Now as for the film itself, very briefly summarized you could say this is the story of a young man/teenager who moves from London to a more rural area in England and what happens to him afterward. Lets start with London. There is a reference to the death of Damilola Taylor, of course it served them well here to include the death of a Black boy as the reason why Walker had to move places. This is also the only real reference to actual events that made the news and even that happened already 20 years ago and one thing that is not said is that while there are talks about racist motivations behind the murder, it also must be said that the offenders were career criminals active in bank robberies and lots of other stuff before that. Anyway, lets move on. Lets talk about Walker at his new home. There he says he runs into racist gangs that control the place and heavily beat him up. Of course they also re-enacted these violent scenes and show his former self with heavy injuries to shock the audience as much as possible. I will get to that later on. But you can sure say they are not taking the quietly or subtly convincing approach here and I don't like it at all, at least in this very case. More questions came to my mind. If these boys were really that racist, would they allow a Black fella into their middle? Only because he speaks like them and dresses like them and because his eyes are blue and his skin is a little bit lighter. Does that really make sense after they hated him so much that they heavily knocked him out. And there is talk that everybody was White and racist in this place. Now all of a sudden a group of Blacks appears at some point to show where the protagonist's priorities lie. Where did they come from? They seem to be 3 or 4 at least. Why did he not group with them. There is no talk about them regularly getting attacked by the racist White boys. So there were more than just a few incongruencies in this little movie. But completely aside from that, it lacks all the aspects I value in documentary filmmaking. It is boastful, shocking for the sake of it without offering any depth, tells a story about a man that in my opinion does not deserve to be put on screen. It is neither educational nor informative and that is a huge problem if you make a film that is at its very core about nothing but racism because the only effect it will have on people is create more hate and make the abyss between Blacks and Whites even bigger in a world where racism is especially in Europe really not that much of a problem anymore. Sure there are groups that still promote it, but these also exist when it comes to all other extremes. In my opinion this movie only creates more hatred and the veil of tolerance, equality and respect it wants to submit is very artificial and fake. I highly recommend to skip the watch here. In terms of production values, this could have been made by a group of film students without much experience. It does look amateurish at times like a better film student movie uploaded on Youtube. There is really no reason to see it. It teaches nothing and shame on the Academy for falling for it. Even more shocking to see this being considered by many the frontrunner for the win at this point probably. Huge thumbs-down from me and I am not hesitant to call this entire project a failure and I am really glad they did not take the full feature film route because at under 30 minutes it felt already painfully long to sit through. Highly not recommended.