Oscars: the short and the short of it by Bill Kay

First real taste of the Oscars last night. Although I went to a screening in the Academy of Motion Pictures' Samuel Goldwyn theatre last year, that was well after the Oscars frenzy was over. Here we were, right in the run-up to it, to see the ten films nominated in the two shorts categories - animated and live action.
I'd been invited by an Academy member, Will Ryan, so we got the VIP treatment. I by-passed the line in Wilshire Boulevard to politely jostle towards the desk to collect an anonymous-looking green card which said that it would admit me to reserved seating for the show. But nearly as important was walking into the pre-show party featuring drinks and a decent buffet: huge dishes of hummous and fried pitta, olives, eggplant, rice as well as skewers of chicken and beef followed by nice stickies - dried mango coated in plain chocolate was my favourite. Nice bunch of people, too, bearing in mind that a lot of them (at least the middle-aged males) were that mysterious group who actually voted on the Oscars. I had had an image of very serious men in dark suits, but these were directors, producers, special effects people, actors - all very human, in fact.
The cinema is very comfortable, up a flight of stairs past a couple of overlifesized Oscar statuettes, which are there all year round but seem particularly there for effect at this time of year. You enter the cinema from the rear, and by the time they had drawn back the partition dividing the stairs from the party, all the public were seated. That meant we came down the aisles past them to the vacant seats at the front. Some were reserved for those involved with the nominated films, but otherwise you could sit anywhere - we ended up in the middle of row 6, couldn't do much better than that. The theatre was packed, and the organiser, Jon Bloom, said that the seats had sold out as soon as they went on sale.
The format of the evening was slightly odd, starting with the five animated films, then a discussion of those by their producers and directors, intermission, straight into the chat from the directors of the live action films and finishing with those five films. Symmetrical, but illogical, it seemed to me. It was also a long evening, lasting from 7pm to 12.15 am (the part started at 6pm).
But it was highly enjoyable: ten high-quality films with some intelligent and revealing remarks by the makers.
It all started with a flashback of the past 75 years of shorts Oscars, from Wallace and Gromit to Bugs Bunny, all at high speed, bit like the old London to Brighton train journey speeded up from an hour to a minute.
The two best animations, for me, were a British-Polish version of Peter and the Wolf and a French film, Even Pigeons go to Heaven, both stop-action.
P&W had taken five years to make. No prizes for that, of course, but you could see how much effort had gone into it - highly talented, productive effort at that. The director, Suzie Templeton, has also done a film called The Dog, which should be worth seeing and she should do a lot more. On stage she seemed slightly disdainful of the producer who had hired her, Hugh Welchman, who did seem to be claiming an awful lot of credit for the finished product.
Pigeons seemed to border cheating as an animation, as the characters had been modelled from real life, but I'm sure it conformed to all the Academy rules. It was whimsical, as animated shorts often are, but funnyu.
The two Canadians who made Madame Tutli-Putli, about a woman on a long-distance night train journey, seemed as pretentious as the film, talking about the subliminal dialogue between images and how the film was 'more caring of an atmosphere than a plot'. Apparently the National Film Board of Canada demands 'something innovative' before it will cough up the money - anything innovative, but the look of this one. Up your arse, chaps.
There was also a very self-conscious, arty but cliched Russian film called My Love. Happily its makers couldn't be there.
It was only afterwards that I heard that the likeliest winner of the Oscar was I met the Walrus, a five-minute cartoon set against a 1969 tape recording of a teenage boy's interview with John Lennon. Happily Lennon spoke in vivid images, so all the film does is put a picture to Lennon's every phrase, in the style of Monty Python or Yellow Submarine. Very unoriginal.
The live-action film directors were much more like what I have seen of big-time directors, whose ranks they clearly want to join. Again, for me the best two were British and French, which the French possibly edging it with an excellent comedy about a young boy latching onto two small-time Paris pickpockets and showing them how to do it.
The British film, Tonto Woman, was a mini-Western based on an Elmer Leonard story about a woman who is isolated by her husband after being kidnapped by an Indian tribe for 11 years, an how the husband stops an admirer from getting near her. The director, Daniel Barber, is an award-winning TV commercials director and I think the Hollywood studios will have a good look at him.
The most absorbing of the live-action films was At Night, a Danish production about three female cancer patients. Doesn't sound promising but in 40 minutes it certainly got the viewer involved in the last weeks of the three women and their interaction. Maybe not flash enough to win (famous last words).
The wierdest was The Substitute, an Italian comedy which must have confused most of the Academy audience as one of the characters, a fat boy, kept asking for the return of his toy soccer ball 'autographed by Del Piero'. I suppose you could guess, as Will Ryan did, that Del Piero is a soccer player but it hardly conveyed the man's god-like status in the game. Irrelevant to a pretty silly film, though, even sillier than a Belgian film about an office worker trying to learn the Tango. Don't ask.
Thankfully the roads were pretty clear after midnight, so I was home by one o'clock for five hours' sleep before getting up to agree and write my column. A highly enjoyable evening.