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Friday
20Jun2008

Oscars Change Rule on Best Song Nominees

DateFriday, June 20, 2008 at 10:52AM
Next year's Academy Awards will be a little different. Earlier this week, AMPAS changed a longstanding rule about Best Original Song nominees, limiting the number of songs eligible from one film.

In the past two years, two films have dominated the field of nominees - Dreamgirls in 2007 and Enchanted this year - only to go home with nothing. This past year, "Falling Slowly" from Once deservedly beat three songs from Enchanted, "Happy Working Song," "So Close," and "That's How You Know."

The rule will state that only two songs from any movie are eligible, which doesn't exactly address the issue appropriately enough. I mean, if you're going to limit it, limit it to one song per film. This way, you get more films in the category. I would suppose that's the logic.

Of course, on the other hand, both Tom Hulce and F. Murray Abraham were nominated for Best Actor in Amadeus, and Cate Blanchett was the most recent double nominee, popping up in the Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress categories this year. So maybe we should say one nomination per film per category and one nomination per year per actor. If we're really going to be democratic, wouldn't that be the best thing?

Well, no, because if we're really being democratic, the best choices would be nominated regardless of how many of them come from one movie or how many of them one person is responsible for. If Enchanted really had three of the five best songs last year, why shouldn't they be nominated?

This is a bad decision meant to correct something it won't. Most voters don't see all the movies, and they certainly don't spend an afternoon listening to all the possible Best Song nominees. They see names of writers or performers they like, or movies they saw, and vote for those.

There are other problems within this category, as well. "Come What May" from Moulin Rouge! was not nominated because it was technically written for Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, but was never used. That opened the door for a song from Pearl Harbor and Paul McCartney's atrocious "Vanilla Sky" to get nominations.

AuthorColin Boyd | | in | Print ArticlePrint Article | | Comment1 Comment |

Reader Comments (1)

It is ridiculous-- just like there's no excuse that Jonny Greenwood's deserving score was deemed "ineligible" or that Sondre Lerche's and Eddie Vedder's tunes were overlooked from Dan in Real Life and Into the Wild respectively. Another thing I didn't get is that, as much as Falling Slowly totally towered over the rest, it had already been used before in a little seen Czech film called Beauty in Trouble a year earlier so again, to me, the rules of "what qualifies" and "what doesn't" are as just as vague as what makes a delegate "super."

And while you're changing things there, Colin, how about we fight to amend those absurd rules about foreign films regarding which ones get disqualified (Kieslowski's Red; Lee's Lust, Caution etc.)...

Friday, June 20, 2008 | Unregistered CommenterJen

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