Every year, in the short weeks between the announcement of the Academy Awards nominations and the rollout of the red carpet, a lot of people make it their business to see every single nominated film and performance.

These are people who do not realize that in order to win Oscar contests, it is better not to see anything, lest your feelings become involved.

In any case, if you have a job or a family, and you include the full-length documentaries and the new animated feature category, that’s a challenge - especially in places such as our fair city, where some films take their sweet time arriving.

But some categories go beyond the challenge level, defying the most determined attempts. These categories are usually introduced by the B-team presenters - ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Freddie Prinze Jr. and Sarah Michelle Gellar - and have the word "short" in the titles: best documentary short subject, best animated short film and best live-action short film.

They are also known as: I think I can make it to the bathroom during this one categories.

No one sees these movies. Hardly any members of the Academy, the people filling out the ballots, see them (one of the many dirty secrets of the Oscars). The truth is this: Shorts are made for film-school professors, potential agents, festivals and Mom and Dad.

But the other truth is: Some of them are better than films nominated for best picture.

You can see for yourself in the next couple of weeks, when the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Cleveland Institute of Art Cinematheque devote separate programs to the 2005 Oscar-nominated short films.

Conversations with a father

First up is Animated Short Films, playing at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Strosacker Auditorium on the Case Western Reserve University campus (the home of the CMA film program during construction at the museum).

Of course, you remember that the Oscar went to John Canemaker’s "The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation." (Who among us can forget that fabulous acceptance speech? Or Canemaker’s gown?)

The conversation Canemaker imagines is with his dead father, who did business with "the big guys" in the mob, did time and was done in by his associates. It starts out on a loving note, but it doesn’t take long for Canemaker to bring up his father’s anger and abusiveness. As the son (voiced by John Turturro) presses his father (Eli Wallach) for answers to the mystery of his life - and also for an apology - Canemaker revisits his past not just with animation, but with photos, home movies and newspaper clippings.

It must have been hard for the few Academy members who saw the films to choose between Canemaker and Anthony Lucas, whose "The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello" is a marvel of intricate animation and suspenseful story. Working in a style that’s part Jules Verne, part Rube Goldberg and part "Metropolis," Lucas sets his tale on an airship floating through a future world as imagined by a Victorian gentleman scientist. The sheer complexity of this fantasy world will make you forget the other films on the program.

Pre-cinema verite documentaries

Documentary shorts come next, on the Cinematheque’s schedule Friday and Saturday. The four films in the program hark back to the old days, when documentaries featured voice-over narrators and talking heads - the days before cinema verite and Michael Moore changed everything. The subjects are as traditional as the styles: Hiroshima 60 years after the bomb, the Rwandan genocide, South Africa during the fight against apartheid and World War II.

The winner, "A Note of Triumph: The Golden Age of Norman Corwin," is a portrait of a radio broadcaster and poet who was a huge radio celebrity during World War II but is largely forgotten today. Director Eric Simonson catches up with Corwin, who is still alive and teaching and gets fine interviews with Robert Altman, Walter Cronkite Norman Lear and the great Studs Terkel.

Terkel, who knows a thing or two about radio and writing, says Corwin’s masterpiece, "A Note of Triumph," broadcast on the day Nazi Germany surrendered and the war in Europe ended, expresses "hope, [and] eloquence for the human race such as I’d never heard before. Or since."

A dark comedy

You’ll have to head back to Strosacker Auditorium for the Live Action Shorts, shown by the Cleveland Museum of Art on Wednesday, Aug. 2. There’s no mistaking the winner in this category, a sharp black comedy called "Six Shooter." Directed by Martin McDonagh, "Six Shooter" is a sly tale he could have called "Strangers (and Strangeness) on a Train."

Brendan Gleeson ("Gangs of New York") plays a man who has just lost his wife. On the train home from the morgue, the widower sits opposite a chatty guy who at first seems merely irritating, then seems obnoxious and rude and then reveals himself to be utterly insane.

Of the other four films, the strongest is "The Runaway," a German psychological thriller about a strange child who attaches himself to a mystified man and won’t let go.

So mark your calendar. It might be too late for your Oscar contest, but it’s worth seeing what are considered the best short films of the year: They often give a sneak preview to the talent who will be making movies for the next decade.