2011 Oscar-Nominated Shorts

While the Academy Awards for shorts are usually your cue for a bathroom break, some of this year's contenders take on love, faith and other big-picture topics with a delicate poignancy that makes them well worth seeing---or, at the very least, googling. Divided into three separate-admission sections (Best Animated, Live-Action and Documentary Shorts), this is the usual mixed bag, which means you'll suffer through technically impressive animated films that lack staying power ("The Gruffalo") and live-action entries that can't shake their student-project vibe ("God of Love"). Yet the more subtle entries do stand out, from "The Confession," about a child's loss of innocence, to Pixar's jazzy history lesson "Day and Night."