Tuesday night brings one of the strangest of the rituals used to determine Academy Award nominations.
And, I’d add, one of the worst.
It’s the presentation of all the eligible contenders in the Oscar original-song category, a three-hour endurance test in which members of the Academy’s music branch will be asked to watch randomly-assembled three-minute clips of the scenes in which all 63 of the eligible songs appear.
They’ll see a U2 ballad from “Brothers,” and a Linkin Park rocker from “Transformers.” They’ll watch five songs from “Hannah Montana the Movie” (below) and four from “The Princess and the Frog.” They'll be exposed to a couple of rap songs, a handful of tunes not in English, and a sexually-explicit parody of charity anthems performed by an all-star cast that includes Bono, Sting, Slash, Snoop Dogg and Elton John.
At the end of each song, they’ll be asked to score it on a scale of six to 10. Other voters will do the same after watching the same clips at home on DVD.
And when the scores are tallied, the top five – or fewer, since nothing’s eligible unless it gets an average score of at least 8.25 – will become Oscar nominees.
The Academy occasionally gets it right in this category, in the process honoring fully deserving songs like “Streets of Philadelphia” and “Lose Yourself” and “Falling Slowly."
But it’s a terrible system, and it doesn’t do what the Academy wants it to do.
The whole idea behind requiring voters to watch film clips instead of just listening to the songs was to make sure they considered how the songs work within the film.
But those clips don’t show you how the songs work within the context of the film. Instead, they show you how the songs work within those little three-minute scenes.
That’s not the same thing. Not even close.
In the four years since the process was instituted, 16 songs have received nominations. Nine of them, almost 60 percent, were performed onscreen, which is obviously the format that stands out the most in a string of clips. (By contrast, fewer than 20 percent of the nominees were performed onscreen in the 10 years before the process was initiated.)
Three other nominees provided prominent musical accompaniment for montages (or, in the case of “Slumdog Millionaire,” a chase scene). Three were used in the end credits, but with significant visual accompaniment: an entire end-credits dance sequence in “Slumdog,” an animated illustration of the lyrics in “Wall-E.” Only one, Dolly Parton’s jaunty “Travelin’ Thru” from “Transamerica,” appeared in the credits unaccompanied.
Songs that are performed onscreen are not automatically better than songs that are used unobtrusively. Songs that appear in the end credits with cute little sequences built around them are not necessarily more integral to their films than end-credits songs that play behind lists of names.
But this system suggests that both of those things are true, and in the process it does a real disservice to the art of writing music for films.
