Maggie Simpson in “The Longest Day” (Twentieth Century Fox Film Corp.)

This year’s Academy Award nominees for short films are a mixed bag of veteran animators and talented newcomers. Each category has some clear standouts and a few duds. Want to know which shorts to pick to win this year’s Oscar pool?

Animated

One of the most imaginative adult animations in this year’s selection is director Timothy Reckart’s “Head Over Heels,” a clever Claymation that plays with perspective. At this point in their marriage, Walter and Madge cannot agree which way is up—so Walter lives on the floor and Madge on the ceiling. They eat in silence, upside down from each other, fighting gravity just to avoid one another during daily rituals. Their domestic balance tips when Walter tries to remind Madge of their youth, when they were happier, and their floating house falls to Earth, forcing a choice: Leave or stay?

The other stop-motion animated short in the running is “Fresh Guacamole.” Video artist Adam Pesapane, known as PES, shows viewers how to turn household objects into guac. Every action is pun play: a tomato is diced into red dice and the final product eaten with poker chips. “The Longest Day” is similarly fun and frivolous, an abbreviated episode of The Simpsons where beloved toddler Maggie Simpson outsmarts a bully at the Ayn Rand Daycare Center. It’s like any other smart, lighthearted episode from the series.

(©Adam and Dog)

Animator Minkyu Lee’s Oscar entrant “Adam and Dog” tells a different story from Adam and Eve’s Garden of Eden: how the very first dog became man’s best friend. The film is beautiful with all the hallmark sentimentality and animal affection of Walt Disney Animation Studios, where Lee is a character designer. “Paperman” is a playful romance in 1950s Manhattan from fellow Disney animator John Kahrs. The protagonists, a young couple, meet on a train, go their separate ways, but want to be together so much that even the wind pushes them back into each other’s paths. Though black-and-white, the character design here is similar to Disney’s Tangled and Pixar’s Monsters, Inc., whose animation teams were both led by Kahrs. Thematically, both shorts feel only slightly more adult-oriented than a typical Disney animation.

Live Action

Director Bryan Buckley’s “Asad” is a standout among a year of sentimental live-action shorts. Beautifully shot in a Somali fishing village, the fable places a young boy, Asad (Harun Mohammed), between brutal life in a war-torn country and a heritage of myth and magic. He wants to be a pirate like his older friends, the bold breadwinners of his village, where Asad is impressionable and his family is hungry. But when a pirate attack ends in death, and armed teenagers from Mogadishu threaten his friends, Asad breaks a lifelong curse with a heroic display of individuality. His personal growth by the film’s end conveys a kind of optimism when set against so much fear and violence. The 18-minute length feels just right.

Filmed in collaboration with local filmmakers in Afghanistan, Sam French’s “Buzkashi Boys” is also a coming-of-age story from Western storytellers in a foreign setting, and one of the first fiction films shot in Kabul. Between ruins and mountains, and so much dirt that it’s worn like clothing, two boys—a blacksmith’s son and the son of a beggar—dream of escaping the paths of their families and becoming athletes playing buzkashi, an Afghan sport similar to polo, with a dead goat instead of a ball. But to poor boys with strict families who can’t see a way into their own future, even playing this sport is an impossible dream. The short may share themes with “Asad,” but “Buzkashi Boys” does not have the other film’s subtlety or humor, and where “Asad” ends with ambiguity, “Buzkashi Boys” has an ending that’s a little too pat.

“Henry” is a beautiful idea. This second short by Canadian writer/director Yan England depicts a day from the perspective of a man with Alzheimer’s (Gérard Poirier), showing his disjointed reality as though it is actually happening to him, and the audience struggles to follow how moments connect, as he does. The emotions are heavy-handed here but with a conceit clever enough to make the protagonist’s confusion cutting and resonant.

In “Curfew,” a last-minute request to babysit his estranged niece offers Ritchie (played by the film’s director, Shawn Christensen) a second chance at life—literally, as the call comes during his suicide attempt. Fortunately, Richie and his niece (Fatima Ptacek) have enough charisma to withstand a script that tries to hit emotional high notes without sufficient build-up. (Their dance number in a bowling alley is nonetheless a memorable turning point in their relationship.)

What if you fought your way back from death for love and discovered by the time you got there that it was too late? In Belgian director Tom Van Avermaet’s supernatural story “Death of a Shadow,” a man is given that chance to come back from the dead. First, he has to capture 10,000 deaths on camera to regain his life. It’s a clever retelling of the Orpheus myth, but it lacks a big truth about love and sacrifice.

For the Oscar pool:  the top-notch “Asad” (live action) and “Head Over Heels” (animated) are quality shorts worth watching with or without an Academy Award behind them. They could also win. But you never know if this year could be a chance for Matt Groening to receive an Oscar for his work with The Simpsons, or to reward “Paperman” animator John Kahrs for his trademark work at Pixar and Disney. For live-action films, “Asad” is still my best bet, but “Curfew” has already won more than a dozen awards in this year’s festival circuit, and “Henry” has an emotional core that might grab Academy voters.

These 10 nominees will be released in theaters nationwide starting February 1. At-home viewing through iTunes and on demand begins February 19.