What we've got here is a dead goat

Oscar Nominated Live Action Shorts

Crit

• Dood van een Schaduw (Death of a shadow)--Literally. The conceit is that at the moment of death, a sort of photograph of the decedent's shadow, to be displayed Night Gallery-style by a macabre death-art connoiseur, can be taken . . . by a dead person. Ambitious, but really kinda silly.
• Henry--Elderly concert pianist haunted by visions or kidnappers or the past. Tries for poignancy, achieves little that's not obvious.
• Curfew--The standout for me begins with a guy bleeding out in the bathtub from his slashed wrists when the phone rings: his estranged sister, desperate for someone to watch her daughter Sophia for a couple of hours. Bonding between uncle and niece may be inevitable, but it doesn't ring false. Continuity alert: am I mistaken, or does Mom call her kid Sylvia at the end?
• Buzkashi Boys--The moment Ahmad declares that when he grows up he's going to be a famous rider of the wacky Afghan sport of the title (which involves toting a goat corpse while on horseback), we know he's not going to be around for the end credits, and that his pal Rafi is going to have to live on for his friend. The biggest surprise about this film is the beauty of the Afghan mountains--including, honestly, a junkyard mountain of derelict buses.
• Asad--Somali boy torn between the romance of piracy and the entreaties of a surrogate grandfather who would have him follow him in catching tuna. A bizarre, out-of-left-field ending somehow works.

Oscar Nominated Animated Shorts

Crit

• Maggie Simpson in "The Longest Daycare"--Team Groening is reliable if unspectacular, as Maggie battles her longtime unibrowed nemesis over the life of a butterfly. If you were making odds, you'd have to make this cofavorite with the Disney just on reputation, I suppose, though I wouldn't choose either.
• Adam & Dog--Lush backgrounds frame a story of the genesis and evolution of an interspecial relationship, set in Genesis itself. Smart and mostly unsentimental, this one is my pick, I think.
• Fresh Guacamole--Extremely short and extremely clever, if not particularly substantial.
• Head over Heels--A lovely metaphor of the divergence of lives in a long marriage. If this were to win, I'd have no complaints.
• Paperman--As I thought when I first saw this, it's perfectly serviceable Disney.

Bonus tracks

• Abiogenesis--Sci-fi trippy, Genesis from another direction.
• Dripped--Arsophagy: a word I've just coined for the consumption of paintings, by which one takes on characteristics of the works. As the title suggests, this ultimately becomes a Jackson Pollack tribute.
• The Gruffalo's Child--Yes, yes, it's nice to hear all those familiar Brit voices--though also a little odd since, the previous 7 films being essentially silent, I'd heard hardly any voices not belonging to my theatermates.