For Oscar diversity, see short films at Landmark’s Midtown Art Cinema

It may seem like faint consolation, but this year’s Oscar-nominated animated and live-action short films represent a refreshing diversity that’s sorely lacking among all of the “so white” nominees in the major categories.

Landmark’s Midtown Art Cinema is screening all 10 of the shorts, on two separate bills (opening Friday for a two-week run).

Thanks in no small part to the widespread popularity and name recognition of its Disney/Pixar brand, the probable front-runner in the animated category is the lavish and fanciful “Sanjay’s Super Team” (7 minutes). It’s about a young Indian boy who reluctantly interrupts watching his favorite cartoon superhero show during his father’s daily Hindu observance. The son’s vivid imagination makes the very best of the situation.

A worthy dark horse, so to speak, might be “Bear Story” (10 minutes), a lovely and affecting Chilean film. Using stop-motion-style techniques, it takes place in a deceptively quaint little village inhabited only by humanized bears. One of them is a melancholy street vendor, with an automated — and truly magical — diorama in tow.

The Russian entry “We Can’t Live Without Cosmos” (15 minutes) succeeds on a more modest, less flashy level. It tells a mainly whimsical, if finally thought-provoking, story of two lifelong friends and astronauts-in-training.

The longest (which is to say the most overlong) of the animated nominees is the American-made “World of Tomorrow” (16 minutes), a crudely etched futuristic fantasy featuring stick-figure characters, lots of childlike doodling and such.

The shortest of the shorts is “Prologue” (6 minutes), a French/British co-production that depicts a famous battle of the Spartan/Athenian wars. Hand-drawn in shades of penciled gray (with striking flashes of color), this one’s definitely not for the kids, given its graphic-novel-style violence and nudity.

Serious and topical dramas headline the live-action category. The German domestic drama “Everything Will Be Okay” (30 minutes) involves a divorced father’s visitation day with his adolescent daughter. Tensions gradually build, as she begins (as do we) to sense some larger issues at play, and the real measure of his desperation to keep her.

Cultural and political differences clash in a pair of the others. The gritty and gripping “Day One” (25 minutes), produced under the auspices of the American Film Institute, also follows a single day — an Afghan-American woman’s first on her new job as a U.S. military interpreter in Afghanistan.

Even more haunting is the Kosovo drama “Shok” (21 minutes). Two Albanian schoolboys and best friends confront the dangers of daily life under the rule of invading Serbian forces. Of this year’s live-action nominees, it ultimately packs the biggest punch.

On a welcome lighter note is the sweet Irish romance “Stutterer” (13 minutes). The plot concerns the courtship of a couple who meet in an online chat room.

And “Ave Maria” (14 minutes) is possibly most disarming of all — a Palestinian comedy about the chance encounter between a bickering Israeli family and an order of West Bank nuns vowed to silence. It’s a finely balanced and warmly felt delight.

Variety is the spice of life, to be sure, as this year’s lineup of nominated shorts confirms in more ways than one.