Frederic Back (1924 - 2013)

Christmas is usually a time of joy and cheer. After all, we are celebrating the birth of Christ, who came down for our sins. Unfortunately, sometimes those are times of sadness, as those are the days of passing for some people. Men like Charlie Chaplin and former Rangers manager Billy Martin died on Christmas Day, while Kurosawa regular Toshio Mifune and former Rangers manager Johnny Oates died on Christmas Eve. Well now we can add another figure to those that died around this time: the great French Canadian animator Frederic Back.

Best Animated Short - 1993

Our journey in reviewing the Oscar nominated animated shorts has taken me to 1993 Oscars. This was the first time I remember watching any parts of the Oscar ceremony. Before I get into that story, let me first clarify something. The Oscars are an annual thing, so there will have to be a way to designate which ceremony you are talking about. There are generally three ways to do so. The first way is to do the official title, which counts the ceremonies using the 1927-28 one as the first one. So for example one we are reviewing is the 66th annual Academy Awards while the one that just passed is the 85th annual Academy Awards. I don't like this method because it is annoying and requires a lot of math. An alternative method is to do it by year, but even then there are two ways to do so. One is to do it by the year of the ceremony, so in this case would be the ceremony from 1994. The other is to do it by the year the movies they were celebrating came out. So this would be the 1993 Oscars, since the films that were nominated had their release in 1993. This is the way I do it.