“All the Empty Rooms,” project of Steve Hartman, wins Oscar

CATSKILL―For seven years, veteran CBS journalist and Catskill resident Steve Hartman documented the empty, undisturbed bedrooms of children lost to school shootings.

His emotional cross-country journey with photographer Lou Bopp resulted in the Netflix documentary All the Empty Rooms that on Sunday won the 2026 Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Film.

“I’ve been typecast as, you know, the feel-good happy news kind of guy,” said Hartman, known for his inspiring stories about goodness, compassion, and humanity.

“I’m the guy they bring in at the end to restore people’s faith in humanity,” he added.

“What I've been doing is just whitewashing the whole thing,” Hartman said. “I felt like, you know, I gotta do something different. What could I do?”

So, unbeknownst to his network’s bosses, Hartman embarked on a mission to show America the relentless grief of eight families in five different communities whose children were gunned down in their own schools. He visited Uvalde, TX; Parkland, FL; Santa Clarita, CA; Nashville, TN; and Newtown, CT.

Released last year, All the Empty Rooms explores the empty bedrooms―sacred ground―preserved by the victims’ parents and looking exactly as they did when the child left for what would be their final day of school. Stuffed animals remain on beds, posters still decorate walls, clothes hang in closets and toys lay on floors.

One of the rooms is that of nine-year-old Jackie Cazaras, killed in the Robb Elementary school shooting on May 24, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas. Her mother, Gloria Cazares, joined Hartman, Producer Conall Jones and Director Joshua Seftel on stage Sunday to accept the Oscar statuette.

"Since that day, her bedroom has been frozen in time," Cazares said. "Jackie is more than just a headline. She is our light and our life.”

Nineteen children and two teachers died that day in Uvalde. In 2021, gun violence replaced car crashes as the leading cause of death for children in the United States.

“I wish that we could transport all Americans to stand in one of those bedrooms for just a few minutes,” said Hartman. “We'd be a different America.”