For all of you who want to get a leg up on your Oscar pool competition, Seattle's Varsity Theatre is giving you a chance to watch all ten entries in two of the peskiest Academy Award categories - Best Animated Short and Best Live Action Short.

Year in and year out, the animated shorts seem to eclipse their live action counterparts, but this year, I found the opposite to be true. The best of the lot is a Germany/India co-production called "Raju" about a young German couple who fly to Calcutta to adopt a 4-year-old orphan boy. In a mere 24 minutes, the film firmly establishes the distinctive personalities of both the prospective mother and father, the slippery identity of the orphan, the puzzling bureaucracy of the black market, and the swirling chaos that is India (at least to foreigners.)

Ireland has two of the five live-action nominees, both quite clever, if a bit laborious in their punchlines. "Pentecost" offers a witty treatment of a "team" of altar boys who get ready for serving at the Archbishop's High Mass as if they're a bunch of soccer players getting ready for a big match. And "The Shore" stages a 25-year reunion between two former best friends who let Ireland's troubles (and a whole lot of guilt) get in the way of their friendship. As with many a good yarn, they're both the butt of their own jokes.

Wrapping up the live-action entries is "Tuba Atlantic," a whimsical tale of a man facing death by delivering on his life-long dream of blowing one gigantic tuba, and "Time Freak," a mildly humorous sci-fi ditty about a time machine used not for exploring history but for satisfying petty grievances.

As for the animated nominees, none of them seems strong in terms of story but all of them revel in the fanciful freedoms offered by animation. As a book lover, I couldn't resist "The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore," which introduces us to a world in which books literally take flight. Pixar has another extremely polished (almost too polished) effort in "La Luna," a fanciful tale of a boy who climbs to the moon to do a bit of lunar housecleaning.

Canada has two oddball offerings, one about a young boy who's dragged off to visit his grandparents when he would really rather be putting coins on railroad tracks (Dimanche), and the other, a kind of bad-news folktale about an Englishman who tries to make it on his own on an isolated ranch in Alberta (Wild Life). Finally, the strangest of the lot is "A Morning Stroll." A random incident involving a pedestrian and a chicken is presented in three separate versions - the first is set in 1959 in a black and white world of stick figures. The second go-round jumps to a full-color and fuller-bodied world set in 2009, and then lastly, we get a post-apocalyptic scenario in 2059 ... with zombies, no less.

By TOM TANGNEY