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One of many women in the Oscar nominated short “God Sleeps in Rwanda.”

Hollywood’s famed Egyptian Theatre actually consists of two theaters – the lavish, 616-seat Lloyd E. Rigler Theatre, and the lesser known, 78-seat Spielberg Theatre.

The cynical explanation for this is that it allows the Egyptian to hold less appealing screenings in the smaller theater without having to operate the larger one. But on Saturday, the Spielberg Theatre’s smaller size provided a sense of directness and immediacy to its Oscar Documentary Shorts program, packaged together from all four Oscar nominees in that category this year. The program will run every Saturday through May.

The Oscars have traditionally favored documentaries about historical tragedies such as the Holocaust, so it’s no surprise that apartheid, Rwandan genocide and Hiroshima comprise the subject matter of three of the four half-hour shorts.

The academy’s stamp of approval almost ensures a lack of any kind of innovation in these films, but each of these three manages to find new and powerful stories amidst previously tread ground. It’s a welcome dose of reality to be found, ironically enough, in the middle of Hollywood.

Some thought clearly went into the order that the shorts are presented. The program opens with “The Death of Kevin Carter: Casualty of the Bang Bang Club,” about the Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist who committed suicide after capturing apartheid in South Africa and famine in Sudan.

“The Death of Kevin Carter” is followed by, and in a sense paired with, “God Sleeps in Rwanda.” The film explores the newfound role of women in Rwanda, where the 1994 genocide left the country with a population that was suddenly 70 percent female. The film carries the spirit of photojournalism, going to Rwanda and sticking cameras in people’s faces. Those people include, among others, a single mother who’s a policewoman by day and law student by night, all the while suffering from HIV.

The second half of the program deals with World War II, beginning with Steven Okazaki’s “The Mushroom Club.” Okazaki examines the lingering effects of the atomic bomb on modern day Hiroshima. The title refers to people who suffer mental and physical deficiencies resulting from radiation.

By this point, the cumulative effect of these horrific tragedies becomes fairly overwhelming, too much reality for one sitting. But the program ends more optimistically with “A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin,” which was this year’s Oscar winner in the category. Corwin fused poetry and drama in order to turn radio into an art form, and 60 million Americans tuned in to hear the broadcast of his “On a Note of Triumph,” which marked the end of World War II in Europe with a moving plea for peace.

– Alfred Lee

E-mail Lee at alee@media.ucla.edu.