Homer's Travels: Oscar's Shorts

Sunday, February 15, 2009

Oscar's Shorts

Every year I watch the Oscars and every year I hear the nominees for best short film (animated and live action ).  As I've watched this, I always wondered where you had to go to see these short films.  This year I was pleasantly surprised to see that the Ruth Sokolof theater was showing compilations of all the Oscar nominated short films.

Each compilation was between 95 and 100 minutes long.  The longest short (... heh ...) was thirty minutes long with the average one being around thirteen minutes long.  The animated shorts were generally funny though a couple were of the serious, but preachy, subject of environmentalism (one actually had the main character hug a tree - not very subtle).  I liked "This Way Up", a British short about two undertakers attempting to get to a cemetery.  The Wife liked a Russian short name "Lavatory-Lovestory" which was pretty good.

The live action shorts were often more serious with subjects like mistakes made, racism, and antisemitism though some were humorous.  I liked "New Boy", an Irish film about a student's first day at school.  The Wife like this one as well as one called "The Pig".  The Pig was interesting but I didn't like it as much.

In general, I have to say that I was a little unsure about the shorts.  I was the one whose suggested to the Wife that we go see them but I had my doubts.  I've never been fond of short story anthologies (print short stories).  Either the stories don't make sense or they end right when they are getting interesting.  I speculated to myself that television has shortened my attention span so much that these visual shorts would work for me but that was not true.  Visual shorts are as unsatisfying to me as print short stories.  I enjoyed the shorts and I don't regret going but I was left a little wanting.

One last thing about our trip to the theater.  After buying our tickets we went up to the snack counter and bought our movie treats.  Upon seeing my bottle of Root Beer and Box of Dots, the Wife commented that my selection sounded like that of a 5 year old little boy.  I looked at her Bag of Pop Corn and Diet Coke and said "at least my selection doesn't look like the selection of a generic white woman."  We all got a chuckle out of that.  My selection was a 5 year old little boy's and I'm proud of it.

4 comments:

  1. Dota and Root Beer ... way to go, Opie Taylor.

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  2. What's wrong with being like Opie Taylor?

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  3. Opie Taylor is just your typical 10-year old boy -- that's all -- if it had existed, Opie would have loved Monty Python, too. Hmmm, just like you.

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