Oscar Sundae.

I love short films. I love a lot of long films too, but there’s something special about short films. Like a well-crafted short story a good short film can leave you feeling both satisfied and wanting more, and can pack a lot into a very small space, like a clown car, but less likely to trigger coulrophobia. Short films also allow me to feel like I’ve gotten a lot done. How often can you say you’ve watched five Oscar winning-films in less time than it took to get Chinese food delivered and that, twenty minutes after you’d eaten, you wanted to watch all of them again?

When I was a kid and would watch the Oscars it frustrated me that there was a category for Best Short Film and that, at best, I’d only get to see clips of the nominees. And then I’d be even more frustrated when the nominees for Best Animated Short Film came up because I loved, and still love, all forms of animation, and I really, really wanted to see those films.

I’m old enough to remember a time before cable TV, when there were only three networks and a UHF station, and I remember when we got cable TV. We had Showtime, which often ran short films in between features, and the fledgling Nickelodeon network would fill the spaces between its handful of series with short films. Other channels probably did the same–in those days cable had more space than fresh content.

An excellent post over at Assholes Watching Movies, a blog by some of the nicest assholes I’ve ever known, lists this year’s Oscar nominees for Best Animated Short Films (there’s also an equally good post for the live-action shorts), and reminded me of the first Oscar-winning animated short I was able to see in its entirety: 1983’s A Sundae In New York.

 

 

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6 Comments

  1. Allison

    Some years ago, there was a Short Film Competition that ran at the Belcourt (and locations all over the world on the same day). There were films from a dozen different countries and at the end you voted for the one you liked best. The one from Germany was about a security guy and a shoplifter, there was one from Spain, I think, about a blind seeing eye dog, and so on. They were all really, really good. I don’t remember which one was the winner, but I do remember that the three of us who went together all voted for different movies, and we were all adamant that ours would win. The Belcourt opted out of the next year’s viewing, and I lost track of it after that.

    Reply
    1. Christopher Waldrop (Post author)

      That’s a shame that The Belcourt opted out of it the next year. It’s such a cool theater and I love how it brings unusual and little-known films to Nashville. And while it’s great that we have the internet and can access more short films than we could ever watch there’s something special about seeing even short films on the big screen.

      Reply
  2. Mila

    I love short films and animation too! Hello twin.

    Reply
    1. Christopher Waldrop (Post author)

      I’d say we’re identical cousins but the plausibility of that outside of lame ’60’s sitcoms is almost nil.

      Reply
  3. Arionis

    Your comment about Showtime short films reminded me of one I saw a lot when I was a kid. It was on HBO and ran often between feature presentations. It was about a reel of flesh eating film that chases this guy around a building. Not sure why, but it fascinated me.

    Reply
    1. Christopher Waldrop (Post author)

      That’s bizarre and hilarious and I love it. We never had HBO or I might have been able to see that one. They really ran great short films back in the day. That’s how I also saw classics like “Hardware Wars”, “Close Encounters Of The Nerd Kind”, and “The Big Snit”.

      Reply

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