Quickies in a small theater

It’s one of those categories in the office Oscar ballot that your friend wins, and it puts his total just above yours, and now you’re in not third but fourth place, for which there’s no prize money, and there goes your ante, and now you’re secretly upset because you know it was all luck because there’s no way that guy had seen all those short films because no one sees short films.

Ha, well, that was moi a few years ago. The irritatingly lucky friend, that is. I nailed the short film winners on my ballot going solely on title. It was glorious.

But this year, it’s different. This year, I’ve seen them. And now there’s pretty much no shot at getting it right.

IFC in the west village is now showing “Oscar Nominated Shorts” of both the live-action and animated variety. Unfortunately, I was too hungry to stick around for the animated shorts, but I did get to see the live-action numbers. Just as I suspected, they were a treat.

Outside of student films when I was in college, I haven’t seen very many shorts. It’s really too bad, because they’re so appropriate for my generation’s Twitterific attention span. I tend to see them once a year or so in sets of five or six, usually at theaters where you can sit in the back row and still spit on the screen.

What usually strikes me the most when I see them is the diversity of the selections. They’ve always been from different countries and in all kinds of languages with an enormous range of moods, themes, aesthetics, etc. I remember a collection called “The World According to Shorts” where I saw one movie about a group of nine old men who get stuck in quicksand juxtaposed with another—animated B & W—about abstract, tentacled cowboys and a giant vagina. (American. Go figure.)

This year’s Oscar nominated shorts are much the same in their differences. Let me see if I can do about a sentence for each. And I’ll rank them in order of how much I liked them, because I can.

1. The New Boy: Freckled English grade school delinquents antagonize a new boy in school who’s transferred from South Africa after his father—who was also his schoolteacher—was murdered. Almost unfathomably, it has a happy ending.

2. On the Line: A quietly powerful German meditation on love, jealousy, and regret featuring the puffy-faced security-camera stalker, Rolf, with whom you can’t help but sympathize even for all his undeniable creepiness.

3. Manon on the Asphalt: Wistful narrations of a dying woman who’s been struck by a car, wondering how her friends will react to the news of her death and what her lover will think when she doesn’t show up to meet him, which are striking in their absurdity despite their ostensible accuracy.

4. The Pig: An absurd ditty about a docile-turned-cantankerous old man in surgery who falls in love with a painting of a pig jumping into a lake, which causes a clash of cultures when he’s put in a room with an Islamic patient. Nice twist at the end.

5. Toyland: A semi-confusing piece about the Holocaust and two little boys, one of whom is nearly sent off to a camp, but (his?) mother rescues him at the last moment. Seemed very hackneyed after The Boy in Striped Pyjamas, but I possibly didn’t “get” it.