A short film was the big winner among Canadian entries at this year’s Oscars, which on Feb. 25 handed the hardware for best animated short to Montreal filmmaker Torill Kove for The Danish Poet.

The 14-minute love story beat out competition including the Ice Age spin-off No Time for Nuts and the CG sci-fi Lifted, and is a copro between the National Film Board and Kove’s homeland of Norway.

Kove thanked producers Marcy Page (Ryan, Noël Noël) of the NFB, Lise Fearnley (Pan, Mother Said) of Norway’s Mikrofilm AS and narrator Liv Ullmann in her brief acceptance speech.

‘For everyone else who helped me make this film, thank you, thank you, thank you,’ she told the crowd at the Kodak Theatre, brandishing the trophy. ‘I know who you are, you know who you are, and I would not be standing here with this little guy without you.’

The win is the 12th for the NFB and the second with Page’s name attached, following Ryan in 2004. Kove was nominated in the same category once before, for 1999’s My Grandmother Ironed the King’s Shirts.

Oscar night did not pay off as hoped for Deepa Mehta, who lost her bid for the best foreign-language win for Water to the surprise winner The Lives of Others by Germany’s Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck. The story of East Germany’s secret police beat out Mexico’s heavy favorite Pan’s Labyrinth by Guillermo del Toro.

Canucks Paul Haggis and Ryan Gosling also went home empty-handed. Haggis, cowriter of Letters From Iwo Jima, missed his shot at a second writing win when Little Miss Sunshine took best original screenplay, while Gosling’s bid for best actor, in Half Nelson, was eclipsed by Forest Whitaker’s turn as Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland.