Valuable British Imports

Which of the following directors has won three Academy Awards: Frank Capra, William Wyler or Nick Park?

Yes, it’s a trick question. The answer is all three of them.

Park, known for wearing wild and crazy bow ties on Oscar night, is the British master of clay animation, a painstaking hand-modeling process in which three seconds of finished film is considered a good day’s work.

Park’s latest Academy Award came just two weeks ago. “A Close Shave,” the new adventures of the daft crime-fighting team of Wallace & Gromit (who Thursday added a Peabody Award to their spoils), became his third film to win for best animated short.

One of the ironies of the academy’s several short film categories is that its winners have a difficult time getting their work shown anywhere, even when the movies are as inventive and hilarious as the eccentric comedies Park turns out.

Filling that gap is a program called “Wallace & Gromit: The Best of Aardman Animations,” which plays today through Thursday at the Nuart Theater in West Los Angeles. If you’ve seen Park win all those times and wondered what he’s about, this is a chance to sample some, though not all, of his best work.

Though “A Close Shave” is present and accounted for, missing from the program is the first Wallace & Gromit tale, “A Grand Day Out,” and “The Wrong Trousers,” which took home the Oscar two years ago (in addition to more than 30 other international animation awards).

What the program focuses on instead is Aardman Animations, the British company that Park works for, whose output is not all up to Wallace & Gromit standards. The best of the non-Park lot are “My Baby Just Cares for Me,” a witty accompaniment to Nina Simone singing that jazz standard, and the lunatic “Pib and Pog,” which won the prestigious 1995 McLaren Award for Animation for director Peter Peake.

Gradually building from a quiet beginning, “Pib and Pog” introduces a pair of sadistic Mr. Potato Head types who run increasingly amok as an idiotic happy face narrator squeals with delight and says, “That was a lot of fun, wasn’t it?”

To compensate for what’s absent, the Nuart program does show “Creature Comforts,” the first Nick Park film to win an Oscar and a trip all by itself.

Structured like a strait-laced public television documentary, “Creature Comforts” has an unseen interviewer quiz denizens of a British zoo about how they like their accommodations. The deadpan results, complete with the perfect kind of mock-serious voices for the animals, are brilliantly nutty.

Here, for instance, are packed-in beasts who allow that “the cages are a bit small,” the quiet gorilla who “can’t get out and about” and so “escapes into books” and the Brazilian puma who waxes philosophical about the pros and cons of double-glazed windows. It’s even crazier than it sounds.

This film was so successful, in fact, that Britain’s Electricity Assn. commissioned Park to do a series of commercials using talking animals and extolling the virtues of using electricity to cook, heat a flat and wash dishes. The clever results, also in the Nuart program, are considered one of that country’s most successful advertising campaigns.

The finale of the program, not surprisingly, is the new appearance of the Wallace & Gromit team in “A Close Shave,” like its predecessor a mock hard-boiled mystery.

As fans of “The Wrong Trousers” will remember, Wallace is a hapless and rather dim inventor of Rube Goldberg-type mechanisms while his dog Gromit, a poker-faced know-it-all who barely tolerates his master, is the real brains of the operation.

“A Close Shave” has the pair running a speed window-washing operation called Wash ‘n’ Go that puts them into contact with a fetching widow named Wendolene Ramsbottom. Wendolene’s fierce dog Preston is less affable, and Gromit soon begins to wonder what connection Preston has with a recent spate of sheep rustlings that have caused a sensation in England, not unlike the current panic over Mad Cow disease.

Come to think of it, if the British government allowed Wallace & Gromit a crack at that problem, a knighting might just be in the offing. And perhaps a fourth Oscar as well.

* Exclusively at the Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 478-6379, through Thursday.