What is the greatest education film of all time? Dead Poets Society? Waiting for “Superman”? Actually, can anything top Mean Girls?

Sunday night’s Academy Awards show may dethrone some of these classics, as a trio of education films — Lady Bird, Traffic Stop, and DeKalb Elementary — have been nominated for Oscars at this year’s 90th Academy Awards. Some have even emerged as front-runners.

Here are three ways education could take center stage Sunday night:

1. Best Picture��

Lady Bird, a story about a teenager’s senior year at an all-girls Catholic high school, is up for the night’s biggest prize, Best Picture. But some critics are skeptical it will triumph, The Shape of Water, Get Out, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri instead.

“Lady Bird probably won’t win any Oscars, and that’s a bad thing,” declared a recent USA Today , citing some who think director/screenwriter Greta Gerwig was nominated only because she was snubbed by the Golden Globes’ all-male director nominees — which the writer argued would be an “injustice.”

Other pundits point to the film’s other nominations as likelier categories for victory: Best Actress (Saoirse Ronan), Best Supporting Actress (Laurie Metcalf), and Best Director and Best Screenplay (Gerwig).

• Earlier this week, we published a background feature — INSIDE LADY BIRD:��Greta Gerwig says she wanted to write a different kind of love letter to Catholic school (and��it got her to the Oscars)

Some Oscar observers say the industry dismisses coming-of-age movies that focus on girls, as opposed to boys. “There’s still a persistent bias against the idea that serious filmmaking would center on teen girls,” Alissa Wilkinson wrote in a recent on whether Lady Bird could take home the night’s top award.

Regardless of awards, argue that Lady Bird’s impact has been significant as a critically acclaimed story about women, written and directed by a woman. Gerwig’s former high school in Sacramento, California, St. Francis, her nomination with an awards show Sunday night, where students will come dressed up in their best thrift-store outfits (inspired by scenes from the movie) and watch tapes of theater performances that the teenage Gerwig made while a student there.

2. Best Live Action Short

DeKalb Elementary — a story about a 2013 school shooting that was prevented by an empathetic school employee — was selected by the majority of experts on as the likely winner for Best Live Action Short Film.

• We interview creator��Reed Van Dyk��— DeKalb Elementary: Filmmaker behind the Oscar-nominated short talks about the Georgia school shooting that wasn’t

writers also selected the short for its timeliness in light of the Parkland, Florida, school shooting, where 17 people died: “The immediacy of DeKalb Elementary should stick with voters and propel it to the top,” the authors wrote.

Journalist and author Mark Harris that DeKalb’s win could end up being a “real moment in front of a huge audience” at the Oscars.

https://twitter.com/MarkHarrisNYC/status/967573950866878464

3. Best Documentary Short

Traffic Stop��is��a documentary about the life of teacher Breaion King after a violent encounter with police.

The film is not currently the favored winner in the Best Documentary Short category; instead, Edith+Eddie and Heaven Is a Traffic Jam on the 405 to take home the prize. But director Kate Davis told ����Ӱ�� that the Oscar is merely the “icing on the cake” compared to the real work she hopes the film can do as an educational tool around police brutality.

• Our interview with Davis — Traffic Stop: Oscar-nominated documentary tells of Texas math teacher’s violent encounter with police — and her struggle to heal

Davis says she plans on partnering with police academy training programs and schools to share the story of how violent police encounters can have a dramatic impact, both physically and mentally.

It’s easy for filmmakers to make fun of Catholic school. That’s why writer and director Greta Gerwig decided to do something very different.

Gerwig that her film Lady Bird may be the only cinematic love letter to Catholic education. It’s the story about a year in the life of high school senior Christine (Lady Bird) McPherson, documenting her triumphs and travails as she goes to class, applies to college, and fights and makes up with the people she loves.

The film has already received a slew of awards, including several Oscar nominations for writing, acting, directing, and best picture.

“Why do you think a movie about a 17-year-old pink-haired girl in a Catholic school in Sacramento is resonating with so many people?” Stephen Colbert Lady Bird’s lead actress, Saoirse Ronan.

“You’re watching this person figure themselves out,” Ronan responded. “It’s human. It’s genderless, in a way.”

Gerwig is not Catholic, but she attended St. Francis Catholic high school in Sacramento, California, which served as the inspiration for Lady Bird’s all-girls school, Immaculate Heart (nicknamed by students Immaculate Fart).

Gerwig said she loved her Catholic school experience, especially the teachers, both religious and lay people, who showed such care for their students. “There were priests and nuns who were just compassionate and funny and empathetic and thoughtful, and they really engaged with the students as people, not figureheads,” Gerwig said in an interview with .

This inspiration is evident in the film, particularly in exchanges with��principal Sister Sarah Joan, who notices Lady Bird’s need for identity and attention in a way other characters don’t. (“You can’t do anything unless you’re the center of attention, can you?” Lady Bird’s best friend, Julie, yells at her during one heated fight after school.)

Sister Sarah Joan sits Lady Bird down in her office after reading her college essay, complimenting her on the careful, loving way she’s written about her hometown.

“Sure, I guess I pay attention,” says Lady Bird, who has spent much of the film talking about how eager she is to escape Sacramento for a more “cultured” place on the East Coast.

“Don’t you think maybe they are the same thing, love and attention?” Sister Sarah Joan asks.

While a love letter, the film offers subtle critiques of Catholic school. Dialogue around the LGBT community was stifled in the Catholic community in 2002, the year in which the movie is set. In one scene, Lady Bird finds herself holding her former boyfriend, Danny, as he sobs, begging her not to tell anyone he’s gay. Gerwig said she doesn’t remember anyone who was openly gay in her school. “You couldn’t be. You would be beaten up, or worse,” she said. “Thank God that’s changed.”

Another central tension in the film is the struggle for female identity in a patriarchal church. A montage of a back-to-school Mass kicks off the movie, coupled with a voice-over from a priest reciting the Sign of the Cross, “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.”

“As a teenage girl, you think: ‘Well, where am I in those people? I’m not a father, son, or holy spirit.’ I guess you could strive to be the Virgin Mary, but that seems to be off to the side, not the main event, somehow. It’s a feeling of ‘Where do I fit in this patriarchal structure?’ ” Gerwig said in the film’s production notes. “Lady Bird is running into this problem and railing against it.”

Lady Bird tries on several identities throughout the film: changing her name, dyeing her hair, taking up acting, ditching her best friend for the popular girl in school, returning to her best friend in an epic prom-night reunion, writing her boyfriends’ names on her wall, painting over those names, going off to college, denying that she’s from Sacramento, and then calling her parents when a church choir reminds her how much she misses home.

“Senior year burns brightly and is also disappearing as quickly as it emerges,” Gerwig said. “There is a certain vividness in worlds that are coming to an end. … This is true for both parents and children. It is something beautiful that you never appreciated and ends just as you come to understand it.”

Watch the trailer:

She’s a teacher, a dancer, a singer. But search online for Breaion King, and the top stories are all about the moment she was pulled over for a traffic violation, thrown by a police officer onto the pavement, and pinned with her arms behind her back against the hood of a cop car.

King’s struggle to heal from this violent experience and reclaim the narrative of her life is the focus of the 30-minute HBO film Traffic Stop, nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary Short Subject. Director Kate Davis hopes the film can be used for educational purposes to inspire change in such aggressive, sometimes deadly, encounters.

King is a math teacher and aspiring doctoral student in Austin, Texas��— but, as the filmmaker said, the racism underlying police brutality is blind to education and career.

“I’m a first-generation college student, I’m the first to graduate with my master’s, and I’m going to go get my doctorate,” King, who is black, says in the documentary. “I never thought it would happen to me.”

of her 2015 arrest, captured by the police car’s dash cam, went viral after it was posted by news outlets in 2016. In it, King is tossed, pushed, and yanked with her arms high above her head, “,” by a white police officer.

Still, moments later, King confronts head-on the racism she experienced, from the back of the police car. Patrol car video captured the difficult, though insightful, conversation she had with the officer driving her to the station house about the racial biases that could have caused her mistreatment.

Clips of her struggle and subsequent ride are interspersed throughout the film, interrupting footage of King dancing or teaching math to her elementary school students.

This was done, Davis told ����Ӱ��, to show how the effects of the encounter have remained with King. She suffered from post-traumatic stress for months after the incident, finding it difficult to work, see friends, and believe in herself.

But even as she suffered from self-doubt, King remained committed to her students. The film shows her smiling as she teaches math, encouraging her kids’ self-confidence in their work.

“I wanted people to see that she’s a stellar teacher, she’s an incredible teacher … part of her teaching, as you can see in the film, involves, beyond math, involves trying to help the kids believe in themselves,” Davis said. “She really is focused on self-esteem and building yourself up and self-love.”

Officer Bryan Richter was given only a reprimand — the lowest disciplinary measure — for his encounter with King. But he was fired this year for use of excessive force after putting his foot on the head of a suspect during an arrest. King filed a lawsuit against Richter, which is pending, but “” after he was fired, knowing that he couldn’t continue policing.

“Racism and gender power issues, they exist all over, and not by any means with all police, as Breaion says herself,” Davis said. “But it still goes unchecked and … it can happen just because of the color of your skin.”

And although a master’s degree can’t counter the effects of racism if a conflict with the police escalates, Davis hopes that education in another sense can become a prevention tool — through discussions about the dangers facing minorities for activities as simple as getting in a car and driving. Her team plans to bring the documentary to schools, and to police training academies, to spark those conversations.

“I’ve done a lot of films, but this one I feel could really change the world in a way, change the country a bit,” Davis said.

Watch the trailer:

It was a school shooting with a very different ending.

On Aug. 20, 2013, a man walked into an elementary school in DeKalb County, Georgia, with an AK-47 and 500 rounds of ammunition. Shots were fired. Students were in lockdown. But no one got hurt.

Many say that is thanks to Antoinette Tuff, the school bookkeeper, who talked the shooter down — literally onto the floor —��persuading him to hand himself over to the police instead of harming innocents.

This scene of empathy in the face of horror is the focus of DeKalb Elementary, nominated for an Oscar for Best Live Action Short Film. The 20-minute movie is based on the real 911 call from McNair Elementary School, where Tuff kept dispatchers on the line as she tried to calm down the shooter, Michael Hill.

Filmmaker Reed Van Dyk came across the 911 call accidentally, as he was working on another project for his master’s in directing at UCLA. He couldn’t stop listening to the recording, filled with questions about how Tuff could remain calm, authoritative, and shockingly empathetic in a situation that has played out too many times in schools across the U.S.

“The fact that she was able to see a suffering person and a person who was in need of help… It’s extraordinary,” Van Dyk told ����Ӱ��.

The entire film takes place in the elementary school office, delving into the relationship formed between Hill and Tuff, played by Bo Mitchell and Tarra Riggs.

Hill confided in Tuff that he was mentally unstable and off his medication. She then told him her own story, of having tried to commit suicide after her husband left her. “But look at me now. I’m still working and everything is OK,” she told him.

After Hill said he’d turn himself in to the police, Tuff told him she loved him and was proud of him.

Hill pleaded guilty and was eventually ordered to in prison. Tuff, who said her faith helped her navigate the most frightening experience of her life, was praised as a hero and about her experience.

The outcome of this shooting is very different from the tragedies that have claimed hundreds of lives in U.S. schools, most recently 17 students and adults in Florida. But Van Dyk pointed out that Hill was very different from the other mass shooters: He quickly made it clear that he wasn’t trying to hurt kids, but instead wanted to attack the police. He was also willing to engage in dialogue with Tuff.

Still, as debates rage around the need for gun control and mental health services, there’s also room in the conversation for the role of empathy, Van Dyk said.

“We have to keep trying to understand people, and why, in America, young men keep walking into schools trying to take as many lives as possible,” he said. “Understanding and empathy are essential.”

Van Dyk said he hopes his film can help extend the discussions around why these shootings take place, discussions, he said, that “end all too abruptly.”

Watch the trailer: