Montreal: Immediately following Sunday night’s Oscar win in the best animation short film category, the team from The Old Man and the Sea was invited to screen the 22-minute imax production at both the DreamWorks and Disney studios. Those screenings are set for the early part of this week.

The timing couldn’t be better for Productions Pascal Blais, the movie’s Montreal coproducer. Blais has just repurchased distribution rights from New York-based Ogden Entertainment, in time for the important u.s. commercial release in May.

u.s. composer John Corigliano, meantime, won an Oscar for his original music score for The Red Violin, a Canadian coproduction produced by Rhombus Media and directed by Francois Girard.

The Old Man’s Russian-born director Alexander Petrov accepted the award in three languages, mainly Russian and French. Producer Bernard Lajoie and exec producer Pascal Blais, along with a representative from Japan’s Imagica, one of the coproducers, also attended the Oscar ceremony.

In preparing the film’s large-format photography, Petrov painstakingly hand-painted 29,000 glass-plated frames.

The Old Man and the Sea is a $5.2-million official Canada/Japan/Russia coproduction with Imagica Corp., Dentsu Tec and NHK Enterprises 21 of Japan and Panorama Animation Film Studio of Russia. The Canadian share of financing was 50%. Funding sources in Canada include Telefilm Canada and sodec.

Using all capital letters for emphasis, ctv reports the Oscar telecast drew an ‘average minute audience of 5.32 million viewers (2+) nationally.’ The network says this year’s average audience is 10% higher than in 1999.