Hey -- we were shorted one short!

Pixar's Lifted ... and this may be all I'll ever see of it.

For us laid-back St. Paulites, a trip to Minneapolis' Uptown neighborhood is not undertaken lightly. The traffic is always nuts, and if the cars aren't bad enough there are people everywhere, most of them younger and cooler than us. For movie-watching, St. Paul's Grandview and Highland theaters are more our style: stop by, see a movie, no big deal. But Saturday afternoon, we braved the Uptown crowds to see the Oscar-nominated short films at the Lagoon Cinema.

Among the animated shorts, we liked the heartfelt and heartbreaking The Little Matchgirl the most -- in part because of the gorgeous old-school Disney animation. My runner-up was The Danish Poet, a sparely animated charmer about a lovelorn, well, Danish poet, told childhood-fable style. (The Scandinavian jokes had a special resonance with the audience here.) Her second favorite was Maestro, the shortest of the shorts, which was very clever, but for me it was essentially a one-joke piece. No Time for Nuts had some funny sight gags, but we agreed that it seemed like a lightweight DVD extra compared with the others.

I'd tell you what we thought of the Pixar short Lifted, but ... we didn't see it. The five nominated shorts they showed us included two Maestros and no Lifted. I complained to the theater manager -- no small move for us reticent Minnesota types -- but it was a tough conversation considering the manager neither knew the nominated shorts nor even how many there were supposed to be. It ended with "we just show what they give us on the DVD" and two free passes (good Sunday through Thursday only).

(Packaged with the five animated shorts were a few non-nominated shorts, varying in quality -- but be warned, one of them is not for the little kids.)

We stuck around for the live-action shorts, and we split on our favorites. I was partial to Helmer & Son, an insightful little story about the burdens of expectation that a father and son place on each other, and themselves. She liked Binta and the Great Idea, a Spanish film set in French-speaking West Africa based on the idea that First World and Third World each has plenty to learn from the other.

But whichever ones we liked best, there wasn't a dud in the bunch. Ten thumbs up -- er, make that nine.