2007 Academy Award Short Film Nominees

© 2008 by John Varley; all rights reserved

Every year shortly before the Oscar ceremony the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) invites the public in to see the 10 movies nominated in the two short film categories of that year’s Academy Awards. This year it was on the 19th of February, with the ceremonies coming up on Sunday, the 24th. Even now, Hollywood Boulevard is blocked off on the three tourist-dominated blocks from Highland to La Brea, and the gigantic temporary infrastructure erected every year to support the world’s press, which in turn supports the massive weight of the stars’ egos, is rising in the middle of the street. During the next week our funky little town will be transformed into an armed camp, with hundreds (maybe thousands) of cops, bomb squads, K-9 dogs, helicopters, no parking within a half mile of the Kodak Theater, truck-bomb barriers and, I wouldn’t be surprised, anti-aircraft missiles on top of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Heaven forbid somebody should assassinate Tom Cruise. Without him to protect us, the Emperor Xenu would surely smite us! I don’t doubt that, if they could, the LAPD would re-locate all Hollywood residents to Lompoc or some point equally distant for the duration. Maybe longer. We are a scruffy lot.

But back to the Academy … tickets went on sale February 1st,  and our friends Jon and Marion, who go to this every year, secured us some seats. It is a hard ticket, selling out almost instantly, and surprisingly cheap, at only $5. That gets you butt space in their 1000-seat showcase theater on Wilshire in Beverly Hills, and we arrived an hour ahead of time so we wouldn’t have to sit in the front corner seats … and there was already a line.  But we got good seats, and sat down to wait.

I had wondered if these awards might be in danger. They’ve been giving them out for 75 years (Oscars go back 80 years), but they originated in an age when you got a real show for your nickel: One or two features, a newsreel, travelogue, cartoon or two, and one or more short subjects. How long has it been since you’ve seen any of that stuff, except an occasional animated short before a Pixar film? Still, people keep making them, and they seldom get shown anywhere except at film festivals and such. And, so far as I could tell, their only real function is to provide a snack break during the Oscar telecast when you can stretch your legs, hit the kitchen and the bathroom, and generally get things done while these people you never heard of get their fifteen seconds of fame before a billion people.

Not so, Jon informed me. The position of the short films is secure, because the industry supports them as a training ground for people who often go on to bigger things. Many of the people at Pixar got their start in shorts. And before the show began that night, Curtis Hanson, an Academy governor and writer-director of L.A. Confidential, gave us a rundown of some of the changes that had just happened, including the fact that tonight’s program was showing in 65 cities, and would be available at iTunes and on DVD. All of this was news to me, though five years ago there was a DVD of nominated animated shorts for 2003 that we saw. What with the Internet and all the possibilities of downloading, it seems to me a whole new market for shorts could be developed. It’s about time, too. These little gems have been neglected for too long.

But on to the movies:

BEST SHORT FILM, ANIMATED

I Met the Walrus (Canada – 5 minutes): Josh Raskin. In 1969 a 14-year-old boy snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room and, to his surprise, taped an interview with the man. His questions aren’t particularly insightful—wouldn’t you have been a tad disorganized?—but that doesn’t bother John, who talks and talks and says a lot of feel-good stuff. This is a fun little film but I didn’t think it really deserved to be in this company. I think Raskin might have had that same, uneasy sensation, as during the short discussion afterward he seemed ill at ease. I mean, the credits for some of the other films ran longer than his entire movie. It can take a lot of people to make these shorts.

One thing I wonder frequently in animation these days is, “How the hell did they do that?” I asked myself that many times tonight, but not here. This is simply line drawing, aided, I am sure, by computers. (These days, what isn’t?) It’s very good stuff, I hasten to add, and got several good laughs. But I wouldn’t vote for this one. IMDb.com

Madame Tutli-Putli (Canada – 17 minutes): Chris Lavis, Maciek Szczerbowski. I wouldn’t vote for this one, either, though it is mind-boggling to watch. It is stop-action, using dolls that have no facial expression except in the eyes, which are so realistic that it seems they were composited somehow. I don’t know what the dolls are made of, either, but my guess is some sort of fabric. The movie concerns a woman who boards a mysterious night train. Odd things happen, and then it’s over. Not my sort of thing. IMDb.com

Même les pigeons vont au paradis (Even Pigeons Go To Heaven) (France – 9 minutes): Samuel Tourneux, Vanesse Simon. A very funny tale about a priest who has a machine that will send you to heaven. The guy he tries to sell it to wants a test drive. I tend to prefer funny in short films. Set it up, work a few changes on it, and hit the viewer with the unexpected pay-off. The pay-off here didn’t quite justify what had gone before. And oddly, this was the only completely CGI film of the evening. The animator said he started out just doing tests in the computer, he was going to use dolls … but it looked so good and was so easy, he just went with it. Smart move. Suzie Templeton, below, said she had worked on her stop-action opus for five years! That’s dedication, my friends. IMDb.com

Moya lyubov (My Love) (Russia – 27 minutes): Aleksandr Petrov. The most dazzling film of the night. It used a technique where paint is applied over an already-painted surface, each new iteration advancing the action. This is very hard stuff to do, but the results are worth it. It is as if hundreds of impressionist paintings had come to life, in the palette of Monet and Renoir and Cezanne. It is very good at expressing emotion, too, as things can morph into other things with graceful fluidity. The story concerns a young man of 16 who is suffering from an excess of romantic Russian soul, in love with two women. It swept me along … but sort of left me high and dry. Too bad the story was not up to the art work, which was some of the most spectacular I’ve ever seen. IMDb.com

ê ê ê

After the films were shown, the directors and producers were invited up on the stage for a short Q&A session with Curtis Hansen. They were all there except the Russians. None of the Qs or As struck me as particularly insightful, but it was fun to see the faces behind these obsessive works (and I believe all animators, especially stop-motion animators, must be obsessive; the attention to detail is astonishing). Then we were invited to take a ten-minute intermission.

It shoulda been twenty, IMHO. The only downsides to the night were the prohibition on food and drink (all this time in a theater seat without popcorn?) and the fact that the men’s room on the second floor had flooded, putting a premium on the toilets still in operation. (One ladies’ room had undergone a sex change, was now a men’s room.) Down in the lobby, the ceiling was leaking like a shanty in the Ozarks, filling a series of plastic garbage cans. This is Wilshire Boulevard? This is Beverly Hills? This is the fabled Academy Theater, with the giant Oscars on either side of the screen? Smells like an outhouse! Irony, huh?

Well, another downside, it is a bit long to sit in a theater, but we knew that going in, we’d been warned. Add up all the running times and you’ll see we had three and a half hours of stuff to watch, and 30-40 minutes of discussion with the moviemakers. Show started at 7, got out a little past midnight. Long evening at the movies! But a great one!

Before the second part of the evening the producers and directors of the live action shorts were invited up on stage with Hanson again, and discussed their films. All were there except the Frenchman. It wasn’t quite as informative to hear things about films we hadn’t seen yet, but I understand the problem. When the movies were over and the lights came up, after midnight, we could see that a large part of the audience had left already … and who could blame them? It was a week night. Still, it would embarrassing to have the filmmakers up there after the films, with people trying to sneak out quietly.

BEST SHORT FILM LIVE ACTION

Om natten (At Night) (Denmark – 40 minutes): Christian E. Christiansen, Louise Vesth. This is one of those well-intentioned ones, and I’m sorry to say it largely bored me. Three young women are in a hospital, being treated for or dying from cancer. It dragged a bit and … I’ll admit it, films about people dying of cancer are a hard sell to me, just as films about Alzheimer’s (Away From Her) are tough. But I can appreciate Julie Christie’s performance in that film, and all three of the young women here have a chance to show off their acting chops. One hopes their exposure here will lead them to bigger parts. IMDb.com

Il Supplente (The Substitute) (Italy – 17 minutes): Andrea Jublin. This is more like it. I have a strong preference for the comic in these live-action short films, and a strong preference for a length of between 15 and 20 minutes. (Not to say that a longer, sad and serious film could not sweep me away, it’s happened before, but not tonight.) This one is a trifle—all three of the live comic ones are trifles—and so what? Why should that be a put-down? After a full meal, why not a little dessert? This one carries you along swiftly as a substitute teacher shows up in a rather chaotic classroom and begins to assert his authority in very strange ways. What the hell is going on here? The answer is very funny. Not a line of dialogue is wasted, you couldn’t have cut anything without hurting the film, and that’s the way I like it in shorts. IMDb.com

Le Mozart des pickpockets (The Mozart of Pickpockets) (France – 31 minutes): Philippe Pollet-Villard. This was my second choice for the award. Tells the unlikely (and, I guess, basically unbelievable, but who cares?) story of two sweet-natured and pretty dumb pickpockets who adopt (or are adopted by) a deaf-mute street urchin, I’d guess about 6 or 8 years old. It’s really just a series of comic incidents, and that’s why I didn’t pick it, but it was lots of fun. IMDb.com

Tanghi Argentini (Belgium – 13 minutes): Guy Thys, Anja Daelemans. Here is the jewel of the night. It follows all my preferences for shorts: It’s short, it wastes no time at all, it is very funny and endearing in its development, and it has a dynamite twist that makes you feel good about life. A man has met a woman on the Internet and fallen in love with her (sounds like trouble, right?). She’s a tango fanatic, and he’s stupidly told her he’s an old pro at the tango, when he’s never danced. Desperate, he turns to another man who works in his office and can dance. He needs lessons, and he needs them in two weeks. He learns how, goes to the dance hall … and she’s ugly, right? Wrong! She’s not bad at all. And I have to leave it there, because I wouldn’t spoil the ending for an Oscar myself! IMDb.com

The Tonto Woman (United Kingdom – 36 minutes): Daniel Barber, Matthew Brown. From an old short story by Elmore Leonard, who as you may know got his start as a writer with westerns. (He wrote the source material for Hombre and 3:10 to Yuma, among many others.) This is quite an old-fashioned movie, right out of the John Ford, Howard Hawks era. So naturally it was shot on location in … Almería, Andalucía, Spain! Bring on the spaghetti, Sergio! A white woman was kidnapped by Apaches and lived among them for 12 years while her husband searched for her. When he got her back, her face was “disfigured” with tribal tattoos, and he couldn’t bear to look at her. This is all authentic. Indians did kidnap, and white people viewed the victims as spoiled goods, better killed than allowed to live in such a despoiled state, as shown so memorably by John Wayne in possibly his best film, The Searchers. (Except some days I think it’s True Grit.) (And other days I think it’s The Quiet Man, or Red River.)

You know, I’ve sometimes thought the Oscars should be split into Drama and Comedy divisions, like the much-loathed (by me) Golden Globes. Comedies often don’t get no respect; if they had their own category they might win out more often over ponderous shit like Gladiator (Chocolat was much better) or The English Patient (Fargo got robbed!) or the truly awful Braveheart. (Both Il Postino and Babe were better; hell, Apollo 13 and Sense and Sensibility were better, as well as dozens of un-nominated movies, including the other Scottish epic of 1995, Rob Roy). Probably best to leave it alone, but it bears some consideration. If these live action shorts were split into comedy and drama, “The Tonto Woman” would be my choice for Best Drama. IMDb.com