Many years ago, I was part of a group of luckless souls recruited to judge short films for a competition that was part of Dallas's USA Film Festival. Three out of every four of these films, it seemed, concerned the filmmakers' tortured relationships with their fathers. It was excrutiating stuff, personal and intimate yet clichéd and pretentious; meaningful (to the filmmaker, at least) yet maundering, mawkish and altogether amateurish. Twelve hours of this stuff my colleagues and I were forced to sit through; none of us should have been allowed to operate heavy machinery at the end of the ordeal.

I had flashbacks to that day while watching John Canemaker's "The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation," which won the Academy Award this year for Best Animated Short Film. Canemaker, who has written a number of perceptive books covering the range of animation history, has also made a few films over the past couple of decades.

"My father died in 1995, but I keep talking to him inside my head," narrates Canemaker (voiced by John Turturro) as the film opens. Throughout, he speaks to his father (voiced by Eli Wallach), whom the animator recalls as an angry, embittered man with a fierce temper and a criminal background.

In the course of the film, the father relates to John, as his father actually did in the last years of his life, his story of struggle. The story is told through childlike visuals and simple animation, juxtaposed by home movies, family photos and newspaper headlines.

Still, it's all about the boy: "I never seemed to please you," John fairly whines to his pop. Yeah, and...?

As my experience watching those other short films all those years ago suggests, this is hardly revolutionary subject matter: Who doesn't have unresolved issues with their parents? Giving Canemaker an Oscar for wallowing in his is just going to encourage yet another generation of callow filmmakers to issue forth self-absorbed sniveling. Resolved: Let's all get over this, or deal with it not through art, but in therapy.

Cinemax will present this on Father's Day - Sunday at 8 p.m., repeating it June 22 and 30 at 6 p.m. and 12:30 p.m., respectively. A most curious way to commemorate Father's Day.