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: 1992-2001

Back in March, after I completed the reviews of the Oscar nominated shorts from 2002-2011, I wrote a special post ranking the nominated films in those years by personal preference. That turned out to be one of my favorite posts, since it was fun going over all of the nominated films in making the ranks, and I just like making ranked lists. It was so much fun that I've decided to make one of these ranked lists once every ten reviews. Since I just completed my 20th review, I will now present my rankings of the films nominated between 1992-2001, which were the 61st - 70th time that the Best Animated Short award was presented.

For the most part there were five nominees per year in these ten years. The only exceptions came in 1996, when there were only four nominees, and 2000 when there were only three. That makes for 47 total nominees, three short of the 50 that were nominated between 2002-2011. And there was one film that Disney had locked up in their underground vaults guarded by Cerberus for 15 years, but one courageous man had risked life and limb to bring Redux Riding Hood to animation audiences everywhere. While director Steve Moore will probably end up chained to a rock having his liver eaten by an eagle every day, his contributions will never be forgotten by me, as it allows me to rank all 47 nominees!

Best Animated Short - 1997

Ah, we have now arrived at the year of the very first Oscar ceremony that I had watched, the one transformed me into an Oscar maniac. The ceremony was held on March 23, 1998. At the time I knew the Oscars were the major film awards, and I had watched parts of the ceremony from 1993 (when Deborah Kerr received an Honorary Oscar) and 1995 (when Babe won Best Visual Effects and Anne Frank Remembered won Best Documentary Feature). However, I didn't pay attention to it and didn't even know they were being held that night until I came downstairs and saw it playing on the TV. I came down around just as the show was starting, catching parts of Billy Crystal's opening movie when he inserts himself into the Best Picture nominees. It didn't mean much to me, since the only Best Picture nominee that I knew of was Titanic, which I hadn't seen since I elected to stay home when my family went to watch it. Still, even though I wasn't invested in any of the nominees, I decided to stay and watch the ceremony.