It’s easy to criticize the Oscars for many, many things, and I do, frequently. This year I actually watched the whole ceremony for the first time in, well, ever, and it confirmed a lot of my preconceived notions about it all being self-aggrandizing, self-congratulating Hollywood bullshit. And this was supposed to be one of the good Oscar broadcasts.

Much as I hate award shows, there are occasional examples of when the Oscars get things right, and I suppose credit must be given where credit is due. The other night I caught two programs of short films, the Oscar nominated short animated and short live action films. My overwhelming impression? La Maison en Petits Cubes was easily the best short film I saw that night. Lo and behold, it won the best animated short film Oscar.

Visually fantastic, the animation has a grainy, worn out look that adds perfectly to the mood and story. With no dialogue, La Maison is a story of an old man remembering his life. That’s it, really. He lives in a village that’s slowly been flooded to greater and greater depths; every time the water begins to flood his home, he builds a new home on top of it. The houses are basically just smaller and smaller cubes, hence the title, literally “The House of Small Cubes.” The only one who’s stayed in this doomed community, the old man wakes up one day to find his house flooded, and begins the process of building a new cube. While fishing his furniture out of his old cube, he drops his pipe in the water, which falls down to the cube below the one he was living in, and he gets on his scuba gear to fish it out. As he picks it up, he remembers life in that cube, nursing his wife as she lay in bed, presumably dying. He decides to descend to the next cube and see what memories come up, then the next, all the way to the bottom.

Sure, it’s a slightly obvious metaphor for life: a life as different cubes/levels/segments/whatever. But writer/director Kunio Katô resists any temptation to make the story flashy, or pass any judgements on whether the old man’s rather ordinary home life is a life well spent, or even to give the impression the man is sad to be old with only his memories left. It’s sweet without being overly sugary, exactly the kind of sweet that I like.

And frankly, nothing against the other films, La Maison en Petits Cubes kicks the shit out of all of the other short animated film Oscar nominees. Really. The only one that’s even remotely close is This Way Up, a somewhat dark but funny British cartoon about undertakers. The rest, Lavatory Lovestory, Oktapodi, and the Pixar short Presto are just ok, kind of overly simplistic, and don’t approach the same level of genius. I know some people liked Presto, about a magician’s rabbit and hijinks with a magic hat, when it ran in theatres before WALL-E, but really, it’s same old same old from Pixar. Just a tip: for rabbit cartoon antics, I don’t care who you are, Bugs Bunny always did it first and always did it better. Don’t even try.

The animated short films program was padded to 95 minutes (the five nominated films only total around 40) by some other “notable” short movies from the year. Allow me to say something about the 24-minute short Varmints: It’s awful. It starts as a preachy environmental warning (“trees good, cities bad”) starring some kind of unidentifiable rodents and somehow ends up as a bizarre sci-fi story of giant floating white jellyfish things re-seeding the Earth, or at least the polluted city the rodents lived in. Despite some nice computer animation, it’s quite terrible.

Don’t have much to say about the live action short films, except that my favourite, The Pig, didn’t win the Oscar. But it’s not too surprising, because it lost to a short film called Spielzugland (translated: Toyland) about the Holocaust that’s also quite good. If it’s between two films, one of which is a little better but the other is about the Holocaust, the Holocaust one will usually win. Plus, The Pig is a Danish film that’s about free speech and Muslims, a sharp rebuke to the Muslim community for that whole mess with the political cartoons of a few years ago in a wonderfully subtle way. I’m sure, despite the subtlety, the Academy Awards would just as soon not touch that at all, though credit to them for nominating it. New Boy is pretty good, Auf Der Strecke is just ok, maybe a bit too melodramatic for my tastes, and Manon on the Asphalt is depressing and had someone in a row behind me weeping, but didn’t do that much for me except get Madeleine Peyroux’s song “You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go” stuck in my head.

I’ve yet to find La Maison en Petits Cubes streaming online anywhere. If you’re able to, let me know or post a link in the comments. I read somewhere that if you’re a short film on the festival circuit most festivals won’t let you put your movie online. I won’t suggest you turn to legally grey online means to obtain it, but…well, it may be out there if you know where to look. Anyway, if you’re in Toronto, Bloor Cinema has the Oscar Nominated Live Action and Animated Shorts running March 8th, 9th, and 10th.

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