Oscar Shorts!

Every year, Santikos Theaters earns its way into the hearts of San Antonio Oscar fans by showing the Oscar-nominated short films, most of which go unseen by average Oscar viewers. We planned to view both the animated and live-action shorts on Friday night, but an unexpected tow truck deployment delayed our viewing of the animated films until Saturday.

First impression: Dear Bijou, please fix your projector. If you're going to use DVDs to show films (is that an oxymoron?), your projector needs excellent color balance and sharp projection. Yours didn't (and probably won't today). We still enjoyed the show, but it's distracting.

Setting that aside, here are my impressions of the live-action nominees, without giving away important plot points. Overall, it was a rather sobering collection; no hilarious "West Bank Story" from years past. Glad we're going to see the animated ones last.

• "Kavi" (India): about a struggling Indian family. Very poignant, mostly because you know what they're showing (in this fictional film) does happen in the real world. The dicey projector made the subtitles difficult to read at times.
• "The New Tenants" (Denmark, but in English): One of the two funny shorts (but very darkly funny), it follows a couple who've just rented a new flat, and their gradual discovery of what happened before they moved in. Watch carefully toward the end (the fellow with the wild hair), and you may recognize a versatile, chameleon-like American actor. I didn't catch it until the credits.
• "Miracle Fish" (Australia): Something unexpected happens to Joe while he's at school on his birthday. It was a little draggy-poo in the middle. Just like a short story needs to make every word count, a short film needs to make every second count, and this one didn't.
• "The Door" (Ireland): We watch a family as a well-known disaster unfolds. The projector problems made this one a lot more blue (and oddly, more eerie) that it probably really was. This is my pick for the Oscar.
• "Instead of Abracadabra" (Sweden): Thankfully, the DVD producers put this one last, as it's by far the lightest (but it does still have its moments). We follow a family whose 25-year-old son needs to get a real job.

Nominated shorts are at the Bijou all week. I highly recommend a visit I'll post again tomorrow about the animated shorts. (I can't wait!!! "Wallace and Grommit"!!!!)