‘Like a little side trip to Fantasyland’: Folk-blues singer-songwriter Chris Smither celebrates Oscar win with cast and crew of ‘The Singers’

by | Apr 1, 2026

By Carolyn Brown
For the Valley Advocate

Acclaimed folk-blues singer-songwriter Chris Smither, who lives in Amherst, never expected to be cast in a Netflix movie — and he certainly never expected to be part of a project that won an Oscar.

“It’s pretty special, all the more because it was just a fluke, really,” Smither said. “I feel like I almost had nothing to do with it. It just fell into my lap. It fell into my lap because I spent a lot of time working. If I hadn’t been out there, it wouldn’t have happened, but at the same time, [it’s] not really a thing you could have planned for.”

On Sunday, March 15, Smither and the rest of the cast and crew of the movie “The Singers” won an Academy Award for “Best Live Action Short Film.” The 18-minute film, directed by Sam A. Davis, is a modern adaptation of the short story of the same name by Ivan Turgenev, which is about a group of bar patrons in Czarist Russia who have an impromptu singing competition.

In the movie, Smither plays an old man with nasal cannulas who sits at the bar and drinks a beer. When a cocky young man asserts that he can out-sing Smither’s character, the bartender kicks off an impromptu singing competition among all the patrons, for the prize of $100 and a free beer.

Like his castmates, Smither is not a professional actor, which was a deliberate choice in Davis’s filmmaking process; in fact, actor Mike Yung, also known as Michael Young, who plays the bartender, has been busking in New York City subways for decades.

The opportunity arrived when Smither’s manager and wife, Carol Young, received a call from Assistant Director Jack Piatt. He explained that Davis — an Oscar nominee for the 2023 short “Nǎi Nai & Wài Pó” — specifically wanted to cast Smither in his next project.

“Carol came up to me. I was upstairs playing the guitar,” Smither said. “She said, ‘I got this call. I got a feeling this might be the real thing.’”

There was just one catch — Smither had to be in California in 48 hours, as filming would begin in three days.

“OK,” Smither recalled saying. “We got time.”