Magnolia Pictures and Shorts International have joined forces to distribute this year’s Academy Award-nominated live-action and animated short films in select U.S. theatres prior to the March 5 awards ceremony. The films will later be available through HDNet and Magnolia’s new home entertainment division, as well other platforms including ShortsTV on mobile phones.
“Up until now, people had very little access to see Academy short nominations before the Academy ceremony,’ says Magnolia president Eamonn Bowles. ‘We’re excited to have the opportunity to showcase these fantastic films while they’re still in contention for the big prize.”
The series will begin running on Feb. 24th at the Cinema Village in New York and Laemmle Fairfax in Los Angeles. Weeklong runs will also kick off at Landmark Theatres in San Francisco, Detroit, Berkeley, Atlanta, Seattle, and Denver, while Regal Cinemas in Austin and Portland begin screenings on Feb. 26 and 27. The Gene Siskel Film Center in Chicago will run the series March 3-9, and more markets will be added in the coming weeks.
The animated shorts vying for the Oscar this year are Sharon Colman’s Badgered, John Canemaker’s The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation, Anthony Lucas’ The Mysterious Geographic Explorations of Jasper Morello, Shane Acker’s 9, and Andrew Jimenez and Mark Andrews’ One Man Band, a production of Pixar Animation Studios. More information on all of these films is available at www.animationmagazine.net/oscar_contenders_05.html.
Shorts International, a division of Britshorts Ltd., is a leading short film company with a diverse film catalogue that includes titles from the American Film Institute, the British Film Institute and the former Hypnotic catalogue. The company recently launched ShortsTV and Spanish-language version ShortsTV Corto, short film channels created for distribution to mobile platforms and cable television networks.
Independent distributor Magnolia Pictures, recently released Roger Donaldson’s feature The World’s Fastest Indian starring Anthony Hopkins, and Alex Gibney’s Academy Award-nominated documentary Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room. The company also mounted the controversial multi-platform release of Steven Soderbergh’s Bubble. Magnolia Pictures is part of a vertically-integrated group of media properties, co-owned by Todd Wagner and Mark Cuban, that includes the Landmark Theatres chain, production companies HDNet Films and 2929 Prods., high-definition cable networks HDNet and HDNet Movies, and film and television library Rysher Ent.
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