Adam Elliot, the cute filmmaker who thanked his "beautiful boyfriend" at the Oscars, one of the nicer moments of the evening. I'd just that day seen his excellent claymation film, Harvie Krumpet , a warped but somehow humane and sincere little life-story of a fate-buffeted man who emmigrates from Poland to Australia. Geoffrey Rush does a beautiful job narrating. If you can track it down, it's an animation-lover's treat. (It's playing this week as part of an Oscar shorts collection at the Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago.)

Update: On the live-action portion of the prgram we also saw: "Torsion," a terrific short about a choir in Sarajevo who take a detour to help a farmer's cow; a German film called "The Red Jacket"; an interesting half-hour psychological battle between two men as they play "Squash," rather like Mamet. And the other animated films included the Canadian "Nibbles" and the 2003 Student Academy Award winning animated short, "Perpetual Motion," about cats and jelly toast.