A shortcut to Oscar fame?

IN this golden time-killing era of YouTube.com, it can sometimes feel as if everyone's a short-film auteur. In fact, the home-video geyser aesthetics that result from the combination of Mentos and Diet Coke may be the only category not offered in this year's wide-ranging Los Angeles International Short Film Festival at the ArcLight.

The festival has more than 600 live-action, animated and documentary films arranged into nearly 100 programs, with themes such as eccentric characters and children's adventures, vengeance and unexpected twists, "what if" scenarios and so forth. Those with treasure-seeker mentalities may view it as a hunt for potential Academy Award short film honorees, because the L.A. Shorts Fest, as it calls itself, has a solid record of screening eventual nominees, such as the 2005 animated Oscar winner "The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation."

This year, the animated selection includes a new hand-drawn, seven-minute Disney short, "The Little Matchgirl," a quietly beautiful, poignant adaptation of the Hans Christian Andersen story that plays like a master animation class in transformational imagery and the colored interplay between winter snow and burnished light. Directed by Roger Allers ("The Lion King"), it's also that rare animated film that actually concerns a child, in this case a Russian beggar girl whose loneliest moments lead her to fantasize of a warmer world beyond the glow emanating from her matchsticks. Silently played yet memorably scored to Alexander Borodin's yearning String Quartet No. 2 in D major, this is a small, sentimental gem and, in its tale of dangerous neglect and fierce hope, a reminder that traditional animation shouldn't be allowed to die.

When Disney got involved in revitalizing Times Square in New York, though, preserving what had become a low-income, culturally diverse if vice-ridden neighborhood wasn't a priority. Paul Stone's absorbing 11-minute documentary "Tales of Times Square" -- inspired by Josh Alan Friedman's book of the same name -- attempts a strange mix of grimy nostalgia and hip cynicism, through the use of '70s and '80s-era still photographs of hustlers and prostitutes, tough-guy narration and 1989 interview footage of a proud Times Square denizen named Gerard "Skids" Jones, who had been moving from empty porn palace to empty porn palace as the forces of urban renewal arrived with the brooms.