Overshadowed by the relentless hype of the industry and the media, short films receive only perfunctory recognition at the annual Academy Awards ceremony, which shoehorns their Oscar in some obscure corner of the ceremony, somewhere between the prize for sound effects and the Viagra commercials. Short films generally never show up at the usual malls and megaplexes, either, but must find their audiences at festivals, in special programs, museums, and of course, in the case of some fortunate communities, in the art houses. Our local art house, The Little, will showcase the nominees for best live action and animated short, a rare display of a generally neglected form.

The live action pictures, from several countries, demonstrate one of the crucial distinctions between the short and the feature film, the degree of discipline and control their form demands. Like the short story as opposed to the novel, the form usually builds its structure around a single point, a particular character, shaping a significant moment, often suggesting an actual epiphany. Within their small compass and stringent frame, the five nominees exhibit as much skill and polish as any expensive blockbuster, and even indicate something about their cultural context.

An Italian film, "The Substitute," shows a substitute teacher very different from any other, a man who creates a comic chaos in his classroom, then learns a lesson about courage and integrity from one of his students. Another comic film from Holland, "Tanghi Argentini," deals with an office worker who must learn the tango to woo a woman he meets on the Internet; it also ends with a charming, whimsical resolution. The third comic work, "The Mozart of Pickpockets," suggests something like a French version of a Laurel and Hardy short, with two inept pickpockets accidentally enlisting a child genius, a Mozart of the trade, in their profession, with enormous success.

The two darkest works come from Denmark and the United States. The Danish movie, "At Night," confronts the plight of three young women hospitalized on a cancer ward who form a friendship born of shared sadness and desperation, with a deeply moving conclusion about how one chooses to die. "Tonto Woman," the American contribution, appropriately, is a terse, atmospheric Western, exhibiting the influence of the Italian versions of the form in its deliberate examination of an emotional relationship between a former Indian captive and a cattle thief.

Although short live action films rarely appear in American movie theaters, most audiences know animation. The five nominated works in that category again come from different countries - France, Russia, Canada, and the United States - and three of them display the state of the art in computer animation, with the figures drawn with the kind of depth, background, and detail that has disappeared from conventional cartooning. Paradoxically, however, the two most creative shorts more closely resemble the work of traditionally oriented artists, not all that different from the best drawing of the past.

A French cartoon, "Meme les Pigeons au Paradis," comically illuminates a characteristic anti-clericalism. Like the darkly lit, eccentrically drawn Canadian movie "Madame Tutli Putli" and a rather long Russian interpretation of Prokofiev's familiar "Peter and the Wolf," it employs the digital techniques that have revolutionized the art over the last decade or so.

The American film "I Met the Walrus," the shortest of them all, derives from an amateurish interview a teenager conducted many years ago with John Lennon. The scratchy sound track consists of his awkward questions and Lennon's mostly banal responses, interrupted by other conversations, background noises, telephones ringing, etc; the black and white line drawings, however, show a remarkable artistry, making Lennon's words into symbols, with one idea growing out of another, a delightful method of objectifying his abstractions and platitudes. It's so good that you want to slow it down and see it all over again.

The most beautiful film of the group, the Russian "My Love," set in the 19th century, tells the story of aristocratic schoolboy's love for two women, his family's servant, Pasha, and the beautiful, mysterious, upper-class Seraphima. In its romantic-tragic excess, the movie seems very Russian, in the tradition of the nation's fiction; its stunning visual style, on the other hand, looks like a series of French Impressionist paintings set in motion. Like the American entry, it depends upon the kind of metamorphosis that typifies the most dazzling examples of the animator's art and is absolutely gorgeous in form and color; they're all good, but "My Love" is the one I'd vote for. 

2008 Oscar Short Films

Opens Friday, February 22, at The Little