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 - 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.