It’s a tie! ‘Two People Exchanging Saliva’ and ‘The Singers’ tie for the Oscars 20206 Best Live Action Short
16 March 2026 | Molly Lipson
Two People Exchanging Saliva by Natalie Musteata and Alexandre Singh, and The Singers by Sam Davis, tied for Best Live Action Short at the 2026 Oscars, which took place on Sunday 15th March.
This is the seventh tie in the history of the Oscars, the first being in 1932. The rare draw was last seen in 2013 when Skyfall and Zero Dark Thirty tied for Best Sound Design. However, it’s not the first tie in this category – in 1995 Franz Kafka's It's A Wonderful Life by Peter Capaldi (yes, that Peter Capaldi) and Trevor by Peggy Rajski, also drew for the win.
Two People Exchanging Saliva is set in a society where kissing is outlawed and transactions are completed through slaps to the face. The film follows Angine, a discontented woman whose fascination with a playful salesgirl draws suspicion from a jealous colleague. It explores themes of repression, desire, and surveillance, using an absurdist premise to explore how intimacy functions in a controlled environment.
“We wrote this in early 2023 in response to the absurd and alarming realities unfolding around the world,” say Musteata and Singh. “In the United States, the rise of extremist movements and growing polarization highlighted the fragility of democratic norms. In Iran, we were inspired by the courage of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, while also shocked by related news stories, such as an 18-year-old couple sentenced to ten years in prison for dancing in front of Tehran’s Freedom Tower, and countless young women being shot, abducted, or killed for refusing to wear a headscarf. The extremity and absurdity of these events—both at home and abroad—felt almost surreal, as if they belonged in the world of a film rather than reality.”
You can watch Two People Exchanging Saliva here.
The Singers is a film adaptation of a 19th-century short story written by Ivan Turgenev, in which a lowly pub full of downtrodden men connect unexpectedly through an impromptu sing-off. The cast is comprised of first-time actors cast from TikTok and YouTube. According to the filmmakers, it is a celebration of diamonds in the rough and a testament to the power of vulnerability through art.
Here’s the trailer for The Singers – the full film is now streaming on Netflix.
Winners in the two other short film categories include The Girl Who Cried Pearls, by Chris Lavis and Maciek Szczerbowski, for Best Animated Short, and All the Empty Rooms by for Best Documentary Short, which we covered previously.
The Girl Who Cried Pearls is a stop motion film set in Montreal at the dawn of the 20th century. A poor boy falls in love with a girl whose sorrow turns into pearls. He sells them to a ruthless pawnbroker, who hungers for more. Tempted by greed, the boy must choose between love and fortune. The choice could damn his soul.
All the Empty Rooms follows veteran CBS News correspondent Steve Hartman and photographer Lou Bopp as they embark on a seven-year-long project to document the empty bedrooms of children killed in school shootings. Stepping away from his usual heartwarming human interest stories, Hartman pursues a piece on absence, memory, and the unseen ripples of America's gun violence epidemic. As these senseless incidents claim more young lives than any other cause in America, these quiet bedrooms reveal truths more powerful than statistics ever could.
You can watch the trailer here – the full film is now streaming on Netflix.