Today's Academy Award nominations were loaded with honors for films that first received attention at the Sundance Film Festival.

One of the nominees for animated short - "This Way Up" (pictured above), a tale of two undertakers and a wayward casket, by British animators Adam Foulkes and Adam Smith - is playing in the Animation Spotlight program this week in Park City. (It screens tonight at 9 at the Egyptian Theatre, and Saturday at 3:15 p.m. at the Eccles Theatre.)

"We were actually on the plane when the announcement was made," said producer/co-writer Christopher O'Reilly, who with producer Charlotte Bavasso had just returned home to London from Park City. "We were literally the last people to know." (The directors, who go by the collective name Smith & Foulkes, missed the festival because they are busy finishing animation on a commercial to air during the Super Bowl on Feb. 1.)

Last year's Grand Jury Prize winner for dramatic films, "Frozen River," earned two big nominations: For Melissa Leo's gritty performance, and for Courtney Hunt's original screenplay.

Other Sundance '08 films to receive Oscar nominations:

• Tom McCarthy's "The Visitor," got a Best Actor nomination for Richard Jenkins.
• Last year's opening-night movie, "In Bruges," took an original screenplay nomination for Martin McDonagh.
• Last year's documentary Grand Jury Prize winner, the Katrina chronicle "Trouble the Water," got a nomination for Documentary Feature.
• "Man on Wire," which won the jury and audience awards in World Cinema Documentary at Sundance '08, was nominated for Documentary Feature.
• Ellen Kuras' "The Betrayal (Nerakhoon)," was also nominated for Documentary Feature.