Re-ranking my top 10 favorite nominees 1932-2011

A week ago I had completed my ranking of the 50 nominees from the past ten years (2012-2021) by how much I liked them. During the introduction I noted that my tastes change with time, so the overall rankings could feature some differences from the individual rankings. That led me to thinking about the rankings I did for the previous decades that I did as I was writing those reviews. I created the rankings after every ten years I reviewed, but since I finished my last review in 2013 that would meant those rankings were made between 8-10 years ago. Surely there would be some changes during that time.

I didn't revisit every single ranking, but instead I focused on the top ten favorites from every decade. I re-watched those in the top ten, as well as some of the films that were near misses just to see if some might sneak into the top ten. Well, as it turns out every single decade had some changes in the individual rankings. What are those changes? Well, let's visit each of them and find out.

Ranking the Oscar nominated shorts: 2002-2011

Well, lets pause and take a break here. I've reviewed ten years worth of Oscar-nominated animated shorts, and since the history of this category can be broken down into eight ten-year blocks, we should pause and take a look back every ten years. And how would I look back? Well, I like making ranked lists, so I figure why not rank the films by how much I liked them? There have been a total of fifty nominated shorts, meaning that there was five nominees every year. It's the second time in a ten year stretch that has happened, and the first one was 2001-2010. I've seen 49 of the 50 nominees, so it's a good time to reflect on the shorts that I just saw.

And remember, this is solely by how much I liked the short. There are excellent films that rank low because it didn't click with me, and mediocre shorts that rank highly because I have terrible tastes.

NULL: Lorenzo (2004)
It's the film Disney refuses to release, a fact that still drives me absolutely nuts.

Best Animated Short - 2008

 Ah, the memories. This was the first time I reviewed the Oscar-nominated animated shorts, in the second year that I had seen the nominees before the ceremony. That year most people were interested in seeing how many awards Slumdog Millionaire would win. I wasn't too concerned, as I had only seen four (yes, only four) of all the nominated films at that time, so I can't say I'm too excited about the traditional awards. Therefore, my main focal points were seeing if Heath Ledger can shake off the stigma of being dead and win Best Supporting Actor posthumously...and the Best Animated Short category. It's interesting to look back at my progression at watching the nominees. Back then, two years after trying to watch the winners and a year after starting to watch all the nominees I had seen 73/76 (96%) of the winners and 275 / 317 (87%) of the nominees, or 87%. Three years later I had seen 100% of the winners, and 322/332 (97%) of the nominees. Evidently I've kind of hit the bottleneck.