Fairfield arts center to host Oscar-nominated shorts next week

FAIRFIELD – It’s Oscar season, and you can celebrate it all week long at the Fairfield Arts & Convention Center.

The FACC has planned a series of special events next week in the days leading up to the annual Academy Awards Ceremony on Sunday, March 10. The arts center will host a free Oscars viewing party that night beginning at 6 p.m., and it will host three days of Oscar-nominated short films from Tuesday through Thursday, March 5-7.

Each night of short films will feature a different genre, with live action on Tuesday, animation on Wednesday and documentary on Thursday. The shorts start at 7 p.m. each night, and the admission is $7.

On the night of the Academy Awards Ceremony, the arts center is literally rolling out the red carpet for the public to come and enjoy the show with champagne, concessions, and a full bar.

“Grace the red carpet in your Tinseltown attire, and pose for the paparazzi!” the arts center stated on its website.

Assistant Director of the Fairfield Arts & Convention Center Solomon Davis said he’s not kidding about the paparazzi, either, and that Fairfield photographer/videographer Werner Elmker really will be there to capture the magic. Plus, the arts center is giving out some top-shelf prizes that evening, including the grand prize of season tickets to the 2024-25 artist series. Other prizes include a yearlong “cinema membership” where all cinema tickets are $2 off and concession items are $1 off. Prizes will be determined based on a ballot competition for that night’s award winners, which will include the short films from earlier in the week.

Davis said he’s been planning this week of Oscar-themed events for more than a year after residents asked him to host an Oscars viewing party last year, but he wasn’t able to fit it into the arts center’s calendar.

“I made a note to start planning it early and carve out a spot on our calendar this year,” Davis said.

Davis said he was asked to host the Oscar-nominated shorts, and he loved that idea because he’s a connoisseur of short films.

“I love short blocks because if you go to a film festival, you might see 15 five-minute horror films,” he said. “You see the complete vision of the filmmakers, and if you don’t like it, it’s over in five minutes.”

Davis said people tend to think of short films as being produced by up-and-coming filmmakers, but he noted that even established filmmakers dabble in short films, too, like Wes Anderson, whose 37-minute picture “The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar” is among the live action films being shown on March 5.

The short films have not received a rating by the Motion Picture Association, but Davis wanted to advise the public that the animation shorts on March 6 are not recommended for children under 13.

Davis said the Oscar-themed events next week are a stepping stone toward a bigger goal of one day hosting a film festival in Fairfield.

“It is a lot of work, and though I’m not able to do that right now, I can do little things like these three consecutive days of short films,” Davis said. “It feels like a mini-film festival.”

NEW MODEL FOR CINEMA FAIRFIELD

The arts center launched “Cinema Fairfield” in the fall of 2022, showing first-run blockbuster films, which had not been done in Fairfield for at least a decade if not more. After a year and a half of that experiment, Davis said Cinema Fairfield is transitioning to a new business model that he hopes is more sustainable.

The trouble with the original model was that movie studios demanded that their first-run films be shown for at least two weeks, and in that time the arts center could show no other film on its screen. Not only that, but Davis said he wouldn’t know which movies he could get until 1-2 weeks ahead of time, so it was impossible to plan which movies would be shown when.

Under the new model, Davis said the arts center will show films perhaps a month after their debut, and this comes with fewer strings from the studios so the center can run the film three to four days.

“That seems to be the right amount of time for interested people to catch the film,” Davis said. “We’ll still get the same type of films, we’ll just get them a little bit later.”

Davis also wants to start a tradition of spring break matinees, so that kids have something to do during their week off from school. This year, Cinema Fairfield is showing the film “Migration” at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Friday, March 8, and again at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. on Saturday, March 9, as well as 2 p.m. on March 11-12.

Cinema Fairfield shows a film about 12-15 days per month, and it doesn’t host films on days when the arts center has live entertainment or there’s another big event elsewhere in the building. Davis said the busy nights draw 60-plus people, while the slow ones draw close to 20-plus, so he estimates the average attendance to be about 40 people per screening.

“If we can keep that up, I believe those are sustainable numbers,” he said.

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Call Andy Hallman at 641-575-0135 or email him at andy.hallman@southeastiowaunion.com

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