Tuesday
09Dec2008
'Dark Knight' Score Back in the Oscar Race
Tuesday, December 9, 2008 at 1:14AM
These awards people are flaky. I have always maintained
that if you have split categories for drama and comedy like you do with The
Golden Globes, then you should have different categories for every award: Best
Director of a Musical or Comedy, Best Supporting Actor in a Comedy, Best
Dramatic Screenplay, and so on. It would be a long-ass show, but I don't
understand why you split just the lead acting and picture awards and not the
others.
Elswhere, the Satellite Awards announced its nominees a couple of weeks ago and had Benjamin Button and Elegy in the original screenplay category, even though both of them are based on other material. How's that happen?
The Oscars do a better job, all things considered, but its rules about music are really strange. And they seem to be bigger sticklers about it than anything else; maybe every other year there's a potential nominee who bounces back in the pool of the great unwashed because of some technicality.
This year, it looked like that would happen to the original score for The Dark Knight, which like the score for Batman Begins, was composed by James Newton Howard and Hans Zimmer, and like Batman Begins, it was disqualified from Oscar consideration because of a question of authorship stemming from the list of credited names on the cue sheet of the music. Zimmer and Howard included the names of their collaborators, none of whom wrote a significant amount of the score and signed affidavits to that effect.
That wasn't good enough for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which wouldn't let The Dark Knight in the running. It was a strange policy before, what with the affidavits and all, but this year, with The Dark Knight being the only musical score anyone watching the broadcast will likely be rooting for, it seemed really baffling.
Maybe that's why AMPAS overturned their previous ruling. Yep: The Dark Knight can now get another nomination. I don't know if it's the best score or not, but to disqualify it on the grounds of paperwork is rather ridiculous.After all, this is the same group that lets the Coen Brothers put in a fake name as their editor (and Roderick Jaynes has two nominations to his imaginary credit) and once nominated Charlie Kaufman's nonexistent twin for Best Original Screenplay.
Reader Comments (1)
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Betty
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