Oscar-nominated shorts again

Now that we've reached February 1 and the beginning of TCM's annual 31 Days of Oscar, we get a bunch of movies that were nominated for at least one Oscar. The same is true of many of the shorts, although TCM's schedule page often includes featurettes on movies under the rubtic of "shorts"; most of those, I think, wouldn't have been nominated for any awards.

Unfortunately, they still don't hav the rights to the animated shorts, which as I understand it reside with with Time Warner's corporate cousin Cartoon Network/Boomerang. So we're left with the live action shorts, which are interesting if a bit tedious after a while because the selection of shorts available for 31 Days of Oscar is even more limited than the feautres. I don't think any of the Traveltalks shorts was ever nominated for an Oscar, so all of those are out. Offhand, I think the closest we're liable to get to a Traveltalks short is Calgary Stampede, which will be coming up at the weekend, and which I've mentioned in three previous Februaries.

Two shorts I briefly mentioned in the same blog post last year show up in the next 24 hours. First up, at 9:50 PM after the documentary And the Oscar Goes To..., is You Can't Win, a Pete Smith short (boy does Pete Smith show up a lot; MGM obviously pushed him in the one-reel shorts category since he and the Traveltalks shorts were the two prominent series of one-reelers they had at the time. Tomorrow morning we get another Pete Smith short, Romance of Radium, at about 7:04 AM.