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And the winner is a high-stakes, highly timely and controversial short.

“Two Distant Strangers” won the Academy Award Sunday for Best Live Action Short Film, beating out American entries “Feeling Through” and “The Letter Room,” as well as Israel’s “White Eye” and Palestine’s “The Present.”

“Today, the police will kill three people. And tomorrow, the police will kill three people,” said writer and co-director Travon Free, noting that on average, police kill three people daily and that, “disproportionately,” those victims are Black. “I just ask that you please not be indifferent.”

The film, also co-directed by Martin Desmond Roe, is a polarizing take on “Groundhog Day,” except instead of a weatherman learning to soften up, it’s about a young Black man who keeps reliving his murder at the hands of a white cop.

“There’s no way to avoid the fact that the reality of being Black is often painful and traumatic,” Emmy winner Free said this week in defense of his film — which has been called “more triggering than thought-provoking.”

Though each contender is emotionally charged in its own way, “Two Distant Strangers” is exceptionally timely.

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The Oscars came less a week after the fatal police shooting of 20-year-old Daunte Wright, and just days after the murder conviction of former Minneapolis cop Derek Chauvin, who is white, for the 2020 killing of George Floyd, an unarmed Black man. The day Chauvin was convicted, Columbus teen Ma’khia Bryant was fatally shot by a cop as she apparently went at another person with a knife.

The next day, Andrew Brown Jr. was fatally shot by police in North Carolina.