Hit Me With Your Best Shot - World of Tomorrow

In the past few years, the number of blogs dedicated to covering the Oscars has grown quite tremendously. This officially counts as an Oscar blog, I suppose, albeit one that focuses solely on a single category. With so many options I suppose you have many to choose from as to which to follow. For me I usually stick with Sasha Stone's Awards Daily and Nathaniel Rogers's The Film Experience. I suppose the latter is more of a general film blog than a blog dedicated to the Oscar, but I first followed it for its predictions and insights in the Oscar race. This was back when I was hoping that Spirited Away would win an Oscar, so I've been a semi-loyal reader for a good 13 years now.

One thing that the site does well is that in the down months for Oscars, it hosts events where readers can participate, such as the Supporting Actress Smackdown, where readers can rate all of the nominees for Best Supporting Actress in a certain year. Five years ago they offered a contest for a Blu-Ray copy of West Side Story in honor of the 50th anniversary. I went out on a limb and entered (and was actually one of the winners). But for the most part I've only been an observer posting a few comments here and there. And this includes their most enduring series, Hit Me With Your Best Shot.

Hit Me With Your Best Shot is pretty much as the title suggests. They bring up a movie and we pick one shot that we feel is the best. Then we post it on our blog and at the end we can see what every viewer picked as the best shot for that one particular movie. Anyways, it's interesting to see, but I never felt the need to participate. It would be kind of weird to do a HMWYBS about a non-animated short film on this site about the Best Animated Short category. Until I saw what would be the topic for this coming week.

That's right: one of the two short films that can be chosen is none other than Don Hertzfeldt's Oscar nominated World of Tomorrow. Now as a blog dedicated to the Best Animated Short category, how could I not enter? Especially for the film that I felt should have won the Oscar (over the good but not quite as good Bear Story?)

But then I came across another reason why I never entered these HMWYBS events? What exactly is the best shot in World of Tomorrow?

Best Animated Short - 2015

Well, it's that time of year again, time for me to stop ignoring my blog and actually write something for once. With all but one of the nominees seen and reviewed, I'm at the point where I'd either have to write some content about topics that are not related to this category or wait around for the nominees every year. So far I've been too lazy to write original content, so I'm just waiting around for the nominees, and now comes the point where I can't delay any longer and write the review, because I finally seen all of the nominees.

Best Animated Short 2015 - Nominees

So yeah, as loyal reader Sean Ramsdell noted, the Oscar nominees were announced today. I actually woke up in time to watch them (not too bad considering they were at 7:30 and I had to be at work by 8:15) after getting back from an interview in Boise at 2:30. However, I missed the actual Best Animated Short announcement by Guillermo del Toro and two-time Oscar winner Ang Lee due to computer issues. However, it didn't take too long for the full set of nominees to make it online. The tricky part was just finding time to write about them. I've only seen three of the five, so the full review won't come up until I see the last two.

Best Animated Short - 2000

Well, we've reached the final year of the second millennium, or the first year of the third millennium, depending on your stance on these definitions. At any rate, this year's Oscar race started out to be quite special, as the Chinese film 臥虎藏龍 (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) earned ten nominations, including Best Picture.  Yet it ended up kind of a downer. While it won four Academy Awards in the end, including Best Foreign Language Film (the first for a Chinese film), it lost out on the two top prizes. Losing Best Picture was not entirely unexpected, but losing the Best Director award was a bit more crushing. 李安 (Ang Lee) won the DGA award, which should have made him a front-runner. Instead he became only the sixth person in 50 years to win the DGA and lose the Oscar. He would eventually win the Oscar in 2005 for Brokeback Mountain, but it would have been better to see him win for a Chinese film.

Anyways, enough of that tangent. This is supposed to be about Best Animated Short. There was something quite different about the race in this category, although this difference was once quite common. What is this difference? Well, there was only three nominees. It was the first time in nine years that happened, and it hasn't happened since. So why was there only three nominees? Well, it would be helpful to review the rules for the short film categories as stated on the Academy Awards website.