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One of the more exciting pre-Oscar traditions is the unveiling of the short films that are up for Academy Awards glory — a chance to see a lot of fascinating work in bite-size nuggets and a way to be one up on your friends in your Oscar pool.
The animation package has one known quantity: Pixar's "Piper," director Alan Barillaro's cute photorealistic tale of a sandpiper chick overcoming his fear of the ocean. (The 6-minute gem played in theaters with "Finding Dory" last summer.)
Three others, all clocking in between 6 and 8 minutes, are also charming. "Borrowed Time," by Andrew Coats and Lou Hamou-Lhadj, shows an Old West sheriff thinking back to his father and a childhood failure. Patrick Osborne's "Pearl" shows a life — of a little girl traveling with her guitarist father, growing into a rebellious teen and into rock-star adulthood — all seen from the dashboard of the same car. And the Canadian-made "Blind Vaysha," directed by Theodore Ushev, uses woodcutlike imagery to illustrate a parable of a girl who can only see the past and future.
Those four are up against a mini-epic, Robert Valley's 35-minute "Pear Cider and Cigarettes," which employs a graphic-novel style to recount the life of Valley's friend, Techno, whose wild partying and drug use leads him to seek a liver transplant in China. (This short features some explicit adult content and is placed at the end of the program, so parents can hustle their kids out of the theater before it starts.)
Among the live-action works, two deal directly with Europe's immigration crisis. The Danish "Silent Nights," directed by Aske Bang, shows a Ghanaian refugee (Prince Yaw Appiah) befriending a naive Salvation Army volunteer (Malene Beltoft Olsen). And the French film "Ennemis Intérieurs (Internal Enemies)," by Selim Azzazi, is a chilling two-hander in which an Algerian man (Hassam Chancy) applying for French citizenship faces an interrogator (Najib Oudghiri) wanting him to name names of people he's met in the mosque.
The Hungarian "Sing," by Kristóf Deák, is a sweet tale about the new kid in school (Dóra Gáspárvalvi) who uncovers a dark secret about the school's prize-winning choir. Meanwhile, the European star Jane Birkin shines in Timo van Gunten's "La Femme et la TGV" as a widowed bakery-shop owner who develops a lovely pen-pal relationship with someone on the train that passes by her house.
The highlight of the live-action category is "Timecode," by Spain's Juanjo Giménez Peña, a clever and graceful story of two parking-garage security guards — one on the day shift, the other on the night shift — who find an unusual connection. It's the one short of the five that truly surprises.
If I had an Academy ballot, my votes would go to "Piper" and "Timecode." But I'm satisfied that any of the short films that win on Oscar night will be worthy.
Twitter: @moviecricket —
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Oscar-nominated animated short films
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Oscar-nominated live-action short films
Short takes on life, from the Old West to the current refugee crisis.
Where • Tower Theatre.
When • Opens Friday, Feb. 10.
Rating • Not rated; the animated program has some mild references to violence at a PG level, and one short with sexual situations, drug use and violence that would be worth an R rating; one short in the live-action program has sexuality and nudity and would get an R rating.
Running time • The animation program is 87 minutes; the live-action program is 134 minutes.