Once again, even the shorts are Oscar-nominated

With February being 31 Days of Oscar, all of the features on the schedule are movies that received at least one Oscar nomination. Once again, though, TCM continues the practice of digging out the movies that were nominated in the various short film categories and scheduling those in between the films, instead of looking for a Traveltalks short filmed in the place the upcoming feature is set. (Granted, I like the Traveltalks shorts.)

There were multiple short subjects back in the day: one-reelers, two-reelers, animated, and documentary. Sadly, I don't think we're getting much in the way of animation, since TCM hasn't had the rights to the animated shorts from the former Turner Library (now a part of the whole Time-Warner conglomerate, or whatever its current name is); those are held by one of TCM's sister channels. But in the next 24 hours we're getting both a two-reeler and a one-reeler. The two-reeler is Star in the Night, which generally shows up at Christmas time because of its obvious Christmas theme, but also gets a February airing because it's very much deserving of its Oscar nomination -- actually, it won. It's on tonight at about 11:37 PM, or just after the re-airing of the And the Oscar Goes To... documentary that starts at 10:00 PM.

As for the one-reelers, this time we get a Technicolor short Facing Your Danger, on tomorrow morning a little after 6:45 AM, or sometime following Anchors Aweight (starts 4:15 AM, runs 139 minutes; you do the math). This one originally started off as a home movie of several men trying to raft the Colorado River; Warner Bros. acquired the footage and added some more and a narrative voiceover to make the final product we see here. Note that unles some of the categories for feature films (cinematography, costume design, and art direction), there was no splitting of the shorts into an award for color shorts and one for black-and-white. Among the shorts Facing Your Danger beat out is Smart As a Fox (3:17 AM Friday, following Notorious which comes on at 1:30 AM between Thursday and Friday) is in black and white.