Last night, the football fans of America witnessed a gripping, neck-and-neck battle between two talented teams of men pushing their bodies to their furthest limits. The non-football fans, however, hunkered down for the nation’s most cheerily corporate, least exclusive film festival of the year. The Super Bowl International Film Festival runs five or six short films at a time, with long bumpers of sports footage breaking up the program’s offerings. This year’s selections explored a variety of tones and genres, from miscalculated melodrama to well-scored sci-fi to auto-Eurotica (both puns intended). But only a handful of shorts—some of which we previewed last week—premiered In Competition. (As everyone at SBIFF knows, short films promoting the release of a future feature-length film are the only selections eligible for the prestigious Ad Budget d’Or.) Without further delay, here are the selections from the In Competition section at 2015’s SBIFF.

Ted 2

The newest offering from perennial festival darling Seth MacFarlane contains many of the auteur’s stylistic signatures, from the Frank Sinatra musical cue to the fixation on the comedic potential of male reproductive material. However, MacFarlane’s new short toys with intertextuality in a number of exciting ways, with the gold glow of Tom Brady’s penis a clear allusion to 1955’s film noir classic Kiss Me Deadly. Furthermore, the presence of Brady—a refugee from the widely seen but largely inconsequential Sports Sidebar section—is itself a challenge to notions of constructed reality. 

Furious 7

Malaysian-born filmmaker James Wan takes up his predecessor Justin Lin’s Fast/Furious series of avant-garde films. The original theory that spawned this experiment—that a single film, endlessly remade, will eventually become so mired in its own tropes that it will reduce to a nothingness of content—has been effectively disproven. To the peppy strains of generic trap music, Vin Diesel drives a goddamn car from one building into another. In doing so, he destroys more than just a couple of skyscrapers. He does irreparable damage to the restrictive conceptions of what formally rigorous repetition can or cannot achieve, both visually and emotionally. (We’ll never forget you, Paul Walker.)

Tomorrowland

In the tradition of Pirates Of The Caribbean and the epically racist It’s A Small World film that Disney has successfully kept away from human eyes, Brad Bird uses a theme park ride as his divine muse for this new short. The soothing, gravelly tones of George Clooney invite us to a futuristic Shangri-La where nothing’s impossible. Bird’s short effortlessly glides between artistic intentions, offering a utopian vision of a technoparadise but couching it in a scathing critique of man’s unchecked expansion and the moral corrosion that inexorably follows. With Sunrise, F.W. Murnau had The City. In Tomorrowland, Brad Bird has Tomorrowland.

Pitch Perfect 2

Perhaps the most cerebrally postmodern of this year’s festival slate, the 40-second Pitch Perfect 2 clip is a masterpiece of ironic performance. David Cross plays “David Cross,” a bitter but brilliantly talented comedian and actor who must necessarily take bit parts in pop pabulum to finance his own personal endeavors. Meanwhile, Rebel Wilson continues her tour de force turn as “Rebel Wilson,” an Australian automaton programmed to dispense sassy one-liners and provide fodder for parodic Twitter accounts. Academy Award nominee Hailee Steinfeld joins the cast as “Performer Who is The Youngest, But Distractingly Also The Tallest."

Minions

This blistering satire from animation studio Dreamworks lampoons the pack mentality that has elevated organized sports from a pastime into an all-consuming weltanschauung for those poor souls without something more fulfilling, like jokes about art film, to occupy their spare time. The Minions continue their indecipherable yammering. In a way, it’s a sort of shrill reframing of the final scene in Antonioni’s Blow-Up, with the minions recast as the tennis mimes and those of us on the outside playing the confused, alienated Thomas. 

Insurgent

Jean-Luc Godard was famously quoted as saying, “The best way to criticize a movie is to make another movie.” Today, we slightly tweak that adage: “The best way to capitalize on the immense popularity of The Hunger Games is to make a movie strikingly similar to The Hunger Games.” The second short in the Divergent series, Insurgent slaps a pixie cut on leading lady Shailene Woodley eerily reminiscent of Jennifer Lawrence’s eye-grabbing hairdo. Woodley needs it, too, so that she might be that much more aerodynamic when valiantly leaping through shattering windows.

Jurassic World

The core complexities of Colin Trevorrow’s new short extend to its very premise: Jurassic World is an extension of 1993’s nostalgia factory Jurassic Park, itself a retelling of Mary Shelley’s seminal Frankenstein creation story, which is a retelling of the ageless myth of Prometheus. Scientific possibility stifles humankind’s reason and makes us reckless. In some instances, the price to pay runs as high as the species’ innocence on the whole. Here, a woman’s head appears to get bitten off by a flying raptor. Suspiciously handsome leading man Chris Pratt continues his campaign of unrelenting handsomeness.

The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out Of Water

This film does not skirt the Uncanny Valley. It plunges deep into the crevasse and builds a yurt in the darkest crannies and raises a family of four on nothing but Pixy Stix and cartoons. Though the short’s disquieting visual aesthetic has turned off many festival attendees, younger viewers have nonetheless responded positively to the main character of Robert—some kind of square sponge that feels the need to wear pants despite the fact that his squid cohort goes bottomless and his crab cohort appears fully dressed. Its inexcusable inconsistencies will keep this film from the Ad Budget d’Or, but may endear it to younger audiences. 

Terminator Genisys

Long-awaited, a short that finally fuses pulse-raising action with necessary reminders of the inevitability of death. The hardened, aging husk once called Arnold Schwarzenegger appears in this short to provide Sarah Connor (played by Emilia Clarke) with lethal assistance in the bombed-out wasteland formerly known as Earth. The utter ruination of the devastated landscape provides a canny metaphor for the vicissitudes of aging that have taken a toll on Schwarzenegger. His hair, now gray, once sat on the scalp of the Governor of California. The audience and the film are both keenly aware of this. It’s an elegiac short, attuned to the terrible deterioration of the human form in ways unseen since Michael Haneke’s Amour. 

Seventh Son

Academy Award nominee Jeff Bridges teams with Academy Award nominee Julianne Moore and Academy Award nominee Djimon Hounsou to provide a definitive answer to the century-old question: Exactly how much money does it take to lure respected actors into incomprehensibly generic fantasy mumbo-jumbo? Judging by the short’s appearance at the SBIFF, which has a notoriously high cost of entry, the answer runs along the lines of “quite a bit.”

Unfinished Business

A deeply humane look into America’s cutthroat corporate architecture, Unfinished Business chronicles the travails of the new proletariat underclass. While bourgeois totem James Marsden smirks at our working-class heroes, they rail against the indignities of everyday careerism mostly by getting loaded and unsuccessfully flirting with Sienna Miller. It’s a little yawp of a film, a cry in defiance of our society’s immovable capitalist machinery that’s also at peace with its own futility. In the red-band cut, Tom Wilkinson takes bong rips, which is funny, because he is on the older side and that is conduct unbefitting a man of his age and stature.

Kingsman: The Secret Service

With this short, Matthew Vaughn takes up the noble work that Rob Cohen began in 2002’s xXx and continues to hammer nails into fogeyish fop James Bond’s coffin. Even through its many veiled criticisms of England’s Parliamentary rulings on tariffs, the film crams each frame with action until it threatens to combust. The true star here, however, is Samuel L. Jackson, who is both lisping and wearing an orange flat-brim cap. He says “Son of a bitch!” and cathartically echoes our own sentiments.

Fifty Shades Of Grey

Even with so many stellar offerings, only one film could take home the coveted Ad Budget d’Or. This writer confesses to a running fascination with the Fifty Shades Of Grey shorts, but the SBIFF entry elevates the form to unanticipated levels. The new short abandons all pretensions of artistic merit, instead touting its own inescapable ubiquity with sales figures and, in a fleeting moment of hilarity shot through with existential despair, YouTube hits. It asserts that 250 million people can’t be wrong, while simultaneously illustrating through its god-awful footage that they necessarily must be. It leaves the viewer with a paradox that also acts as a sweeping, rapturous condemnation of the myriad idiocies flourishing in today’s cultural landscape: That which fails to fill and offers no nutritional value whatsoever will forever be the most popular item on the menu. Like weaselly Jordan Belfort wriggling his way out of consequences in The Wolf Of Wall Street’s final minutes, the short puts the society that’s allowed such an injustice to pass on trial. Its Ad Budget d’Or is well-deserved.