One of the more enjoyable pieces of the Oscar race has always been getting to see the collection of live-action and animated shorts that make the awards cut from year to year. It’s a way to get a fix of some high-quality filmmaking without the time commitment the slate of feature-length nominees requires. So rarely do we get to see these pieces outside film festivals—and if you don’t live in a decent-sized city or college town, you might never get even that chance—that the recent trend of sending the nominated shorts on a package tour seems like an idea both obvious and inspired. This week the 2010 edition wraps its run at Amherst Cinema, so catch them quickly.
The live-action program features a darker than usual palette this year, with five films that hail from places as far apart as New York and Australia and feature post-Chernobyl hardships, crazed drug dealers and a miniaturized Slumdog Millionaire. In Gregg Helvey’s piece Kavi, a young Indian boy is forced to work off his parents’ debt in a brick factory while he dreams of joining the students playing nearby. Helvey, who won a Student Academy Award for the film, hopes a win will allow him to partner with anti-slavery organizations to raise awareness of modern-day slavery. If that sounds a bit on the heavy side, a bit of comic relief comes with Instead of Abracadabra, a Swedish tale about a ham-handed magician.
The nominated films in the Animated category are headed up by Oscar stalwart Nick Park, whose Wallace & Gromit films have already won three Academy Awards. This year, he’s up for A Matter of Loaf and Death, in which a serial killer threatens local bakers. Park’s films are usually a lock—and deservedly so, as they never indulge the common mistake of thinking that animated films are only, or even mostly, about the animation—but this year he has some stiff competition, perhaps most interestingly in the form of Logorama.
A sort of retooled Pulp Fiction, Logorama features a demented Ronald McDonald on a crime spree in a Los Angeles built entirely from corporate logos (the cops are Michelin Men). Visually, it’s a stunning piece, and it’s amazing to realize just how deeply the iconography of consumerism has been drilled into our subconscious minds. In the end it’s hamstrung by an amateurish script and weak voice acting—it features Pulp‘s profanity, but none of its profundity—but it will leave you with a fresh view of commercial art that will make your ride home seem strangely alive.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
