Time is on my side

Ah, a good day at the shorts--now what to watch long with dinner? . . .

Oscar®-nominated animated shorts

It's unusual for all of these to be good, and I have a weaker conviction than most years as to which is the best, or which will win. Usually I expect the Pixar candidate to carry the day, but I don't think that will happen this year.

Crit

• Dimanche (Sunday)--Beautifully simple drawings (the eyeless crows--basically just long mouths with wings and feet--are the most brilliant manifestation) carry a boy's tale of double vehicular tragedy in Canada.
• A Morning Stroll--Why did the chicken take the downtown 6 train? A delightfully trippy triad told at 50-year intervals, though the punch line is a letdown.
• The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore--I guess this is the one I'd pick, and it might also be the best bet on your party ballot: a surreal world in which books sustain us and are in turn sustained by us, wonderfully inventive and just great to look at.
• Wild Life--The only nominee in this category to use a significant amount of spoken language, and with its fellow Canadian Dimanche, in a minority in having a more or less realistic (and tragic) setting.
• La Luna--Easily the weakest of the five for me, though in this field, that doesn't mean it's not good; just a little too Disney-magical for my tastes.

As always, the animated shorts are so short that we got some Highly Commendeds to round out the program; unlike the usual case, I don't think any of these got cheated out of a nomination:

• Skylight--Cute CGI penguins--and all other creatures great and small--being roasted comically by the hole in the ozone layer.
• The Hybrid Union--Autopropelled autos finding cooperation in a postapocalyptic landscape menaced (or nurtured?) by a moving cloud.
• Nullarbor--Bland and rote Australian car chase.
• Amazonia--More cute animals that might as well be from Disney.

Oscar®-nominated documentary shorts

Another excellent program, with some fairly earned tearjerking.

Crit

• Incident in New Baghdad--The first and the least--it's rare I wish one of these films were longer, but this treatment of a Iraq War veteran's efforts to do the right thing on the scene and in the aftermath ends abruptly when lots more story seems crying out to be told.
• Saving Face--I had read about the lunatic practice of men throwing acid in the face of unwilling marriage partners or recalcitrant wives, but to see the product of those attacks multiplies the horror exponentially. Yet this manages to have an uplifting side as well, in the form of a harsh law passed (and, apparently, enforced) in Pakistan to curb the practice, a miracle-working reconstructive surgeon, and, mostly, the strength of the victims themselves.
• The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom--A film as oddly divided as the title, as the blossoms are given a heavy symbolic burden: of new life, of endurance, of nature's yang (its yin having been demonstrated emphatically in the opening sequences). A sometimes awkward film, but a moving one.
• The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement--But this has to be the winner, and not only because it's all uplift all the time: James Armstrong was there to cut Dr. King's hair and to march across the Pettus Bridge, and he's still around to watch the election returns on election night 2008. A heartthumper of a film.
• God Is the Bigger Elvis--Unfortunately not shown in the program, reportedly because of licensing restrictions, but it sounds awfully interesting.

Oscar®-nominated live-action shorts

Either I was just tired at the end of the day, or there's not much here. And let's face it: 6 hours of movies in a day is not really apt to wear me out.

Crit

• Pentecost--Is it my imagination, or is there something from Ireland in this category every year that takes cheap shots at Catholicism? Not that I'd object if they were better films. One nice bit in this one has the rector giving the altar boys a pep talk as if they were a football team, but otherwise it did nothing for me. To be fair, mine was a minority opinion: big crowd pleaser, and I guess thus a dark horse for the O.
• Raju--German couple adopts Kolkata orphan, then makes an unsettling discovery. Snoozer that might sneak in on liberal sentiment.
• The Shore--Another crowd pleaser from the Emerald Isle, this one from the North. Also, with a relatively big name cast of Ciarán Hinds (always excellent) and Kerry Condon (what's Gaelic for "wooden"?), this is the odds-on favorite to win, though it'd have to do it without my vote if I had one.
• Time Freak--This is where that vote would go: it's slight, and it's pretty much just Groundhog Day compressed, but it's smart and funny, and Michael Nathanson has a goofy charm that makes his more-silly-than-mad scientist irresistible.
• Tuba Atlantic--And then there's always the offbeat bleakly funny tale from Scandinavia, in this case Norway. Maybe longer than it needs to be, but it works; still, I'm guessing it'll just have members of the Academy scratching their heads.