Maya Cinemas shines a light on the often-neglected Oscar nominated short films.

This Sunday, as the 78th Annual Academy Awards are broadcast, most Americans will probably take a bathroom break or pray the cameraman turns his lens towards Jennifer Lopez and her new dress during the presentation of this year’s Oscars for Best Animated Short Film and Best Live Action Short Film. It’s because while most Americans have heard something about Oscar frontrunner Brokeback Mountain, almost no one knows a damn thing about this year’s short film releases like 9, a computer animated feature that looks like a Pixar film about the post apocalypse.

Thankfully, Salinas’ Maya Cinemas will be familiarizing local moviegoers with 10 of the 11 Oscar nominated shorts in both categories—for some reason, Pixar’s four-minute film One Man Band will not be shown—for the price of one movie ticket.

The major theme running through this year’s Oscar nominated live action films seems to be death and how we humans deal with the loss of life. The United State’s sole entry, Our Time Is Up, follows a therapist (played by Kevin Pollack) who undergoes a transformation after discovering he has only six weeks to live. Meanwhile, Iceland’s The Last Farm shows how a reclusive farmer has one last job to do before his daughter picks him up and moves him from his beautifully desolate farm to an old folk’s home. One of the most engaging of these films is Six Shooter, an Irish film starring the great character actor Brendan Gleeson, who has recently been in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Breakfast on Pluto, as a man who shares a train ride with a strange young man after losing his wife.

The one short action film that truly stands out—and is the only one not dealing with mortality—is the United Kingdom’s Cashback, about employees trying to kill time during the late night shift at a supermarket. The 19 minute piece is humorous and inventive and has many fully realized scenes like one in which the narrator, an art student, stares at a spill on the supermarket floor as if it were a Jackson Pollock painting. Since Cashback has been developed into a full-length feature, you will probably be hearing about this one again whether or not it takes home a trophy on Sunday evening.

While some of the entries in the Best Live Action Short Film category are one dimensional, most of the nominees for Best Animated Short Film create an impressive three-dimensional parallel universe. Australia’s 27 minute long The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello imagines a world where gothic figures that look like Edward Gorey illustrations ride around in airships which resemble rickety contraptions from the early 1900s. Meanwhile, 9 details a rag doll’s struggle against insect-like robots in a future where the world is cluttered with junk like discarded desk lamps.

Though these animated shorts create complicated otherworlds, the films are unable to deliver the emotional impact of the 28 minute long United States entry The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation. This piece mixes real photographs, home movies and animated sections to tell the story of the filmmaker’s troubled relationship with his abusive Italian father, who passed away in 1995. This truly moving film, which will also be shown on HBO in the near future, is reason enough to sit through the other less inspired Oscar nominated shorts. 

ACADEMY AWARD SHORT FILM FESTIVAL ( * * * )

(Not rated, 75 min./animated features & 95 min./live action features) • At the Maya Cinemas.