Songwriters are mad, voters are puzzled, and the Academy's process for determining the Oscar Best Original Song nominees is in for good, hard scrutiny once the Oscars are over.
That's the fallout from this year's Oscar nominations, when one of the biggest shocks was that the Academy's Music Branch only found two songs deserving of a nomination.
It's not that those songs are bad. One of them, "Man or Muppet" from "The Muppets" (left), was the most delightful musical moment in any film of 2011, while the other, "Real in Rio" from "Rio" (below), provided a vibrant overture to that animated film.
But by limiting the nominees to those two, the branch left out well-received songs from Mary J. Blige, Elton John, Elvis Costello, Chris Cornell, Glenn Close and Brian Byrne, and eight-time Oscar winner Alan Menken, among many others.
In what I thought was a good year for Oscar-eligible songs, the Academy downsized to the bare minimum.
(And in a related development that has dismayed Muppet fans, the show's producers have decided not to have the nominated songs performed on the Oscar show.)
Also read: An Opinionated Guide to a Pretty Good Year for Oscar Songs
"Our initial reaction was surprise," said Bruce Broughton, an Academy governor from the Music Branch and the head of the branch's executive committee. "I thought there were more songs that would be nominated, and when I saw there were only two I was surprised, and grateful."
Surprised and grateful?
"Surprised that there were two nominees," Broughton told TheWrap. "And grateful that there were two nominees, because there could have been none."
But gratitude was in short supply for some members of the branch – including six-time nominee Diane Warren, who saw what happened as a more extreme replay of the previous year, when her song "You Haven't Seen the Last of Me," from "Burlesque," was passed over as only four songs made the cut.
"A year ago I woke up pretty pissed off and disappointed that my song hadn't gotten nominated," Warren told TheWrap. "It had just won a Golden Globe, it won all these other awards, it was the pivotal moment in that movie – how did it not get nominated? I was really mad, and I was like, this idiotic system has gotta change.
"And then you get this year, and I think this is a tipping point. Because it wasn't just me waking up going, 'What the fuck?' It was Elton John, and Mary J. Blige, and Alan Menken, and whoever else had horses in the race that didn't have enough points."
At issue is the Music Branch's process for determining nominees. Members of the branch view three-minute clips of the eligible songs in their films, and then score each song on a scale of 6-to-10 (with .5s allowed).
