It used to be that you had to rely on blind guesswork to fill out your Oscar ballots in the tie-breaker categories.
Shorts, for instance. The live-action, documentary and animated categories were all a mystery, even if Colorado has the renowned Aspen Shortsfest to help the ambitious and hip.
But because you live in a film-rich burg, and thanks to the folk at Magnolia Pictures, you have a chance to cram for more informed guesses.
“The 2007 The Academy Award Nominated Short Films” open today at the Chez Artiste. The collection doesn’t include all the contenders. Sadly, the company that typically presents the documentary nominees isn’t doing a theatrical release this year.
But consider the two programs — five live-action shorts, the other five animated works — an international film fest squeezed into an evening, or two. There are eight countries represented in 10 films.
In Daniel Barber and Matthew Brown’s “The Tonto Woman,” a cattle rustler tells a priest how he came to be shot, and likely dying. If this Western from the U.K. has the feel of the original “3:10 to Yuma” that may be because, like that 1957 oater, it’s based on an Elmore Leonard story. But the real draw of the dust-blown short is Francesco Quinn’s gently magnetic turn as Ruben Vega, the man enamored with a woman kidnapped by Tonto Apache, tattooed, then exiled to a lonesome homestead by her wealthy husband.
Illness receives a sobering treatment when three women in a cancer ward face Christmas in “At Night” by Christian E. Christiansen & Louise Vesth. Well-shot and painstakingly paced, the difficult if elegant 40-minute film may challenge your notions of short.
Andrea Jublin’s “The Substitute” (Italy) employs a structure common to short narrative films — as well as Super Bowl ads. It begins with one conceit only to flip it on its head. Here, with manic verve, a substitute teacher humiliates, cajoles and challenges his high school students. Will any kids resist his hyper and silly demands?
More economical than “The Substitute” and far more emotionally generous is Guido Thys and Anja Daelemans’ “Tanghi Argentini” from Belgium. A frumpy office worker begs a prim colleague to teach him the tango in two weeks. He wants to impress a woman he met on the Internet. The movie is beautifully shot and, at 13 short, satisfying minutes, impressively edited.
Philippe Pollet-Villard’s charmingly cast “The Mozart of Pickpockets,” finds two losers acting as accidental guardians to a wee criminal savant after cops round up their pickpocketing gang.
Not to give the animated shorts short shrift, I had two favorites. One is Josh Raskin’s “I Met the Walrus,” a graphically rendered treatment of 14-year- old Jerry Levitan’s interview with John Lennon in 1969. The other is Suzie Templeton and Hugh Welchman’s winning retelling of “Peter & the Wolf” that does lovely things with Sergei Prokofiev’s orchestral arrangement.
Seeing the Oscar contenders for the shorts category has never helped me triumph at Oscar pool parties. But it may work for you.
Even if it doesn’t, know that there are golden moments to be found amid this year’s competitors. And to get a jump on next year’s, consider a trip to the Aspen Shortsfest (aspenfilm.org), running April 2-6.
