“If a song just calls for a bare stage and a pin spot,” said Adam Shankman last month, as he considered a likely Best Original Song nomination for “The Weary Kind” from “Crazy Heart,” “we’ll use that.”
Or not.
The Academy confirmed on Tuesday afternoon that Shankman and his Oscar show co-producer Bill Mechanic have decided not to invite the Best Original Song nominees to perform on the 82nd Academy Awards show. Instead, the category will be illustrated by film clips, the way most other categories on the Oscar show are handled.
The song nominees have been a thorn in the side of Oscar show producers for years, often sandwiched into medleys, cut down to 90 seconds each, or used as a showcase not for the original performers, but for more recognizable stars like Beyoncé.
But apart from the Eminen song “Lose Yourself,” which at the composer’s request was not performed on the 75th Oscar show, the nominated songs have been performed on every Oscar show for the past 20 years.
Still, Shankman is definitely planning other musical interludes: he’s announced on Twitter that 69 dancers will appear on the Oscars, including at least 13 from the show on which he appears as a judge, “So You Think You Can Dance.” (Right, Shankman auditions dancers in late January. )
A spokesperson for the show also says that Shankman is planning "something different" for the score category, which will result in additional time showcasing the music branch's other nominees.
A promotional video released by the Academy last week shows Mechanic and Shankman, at a production meeting, talking about a rundown of the show that includes “three songs that we don’t know if we’re even going to have.”
Presumably, that would have been two medleys, plus a solo performance of “The Weary Kind.”
Ironically, the Academy music branch process that was designed to make sure that the nominated songs are integral to their films may have made it easier to knock the nominees off the show. Voters view clips of how the songs are used in each film, a system that often results in most or all of the nominations going to songs that are performed onscreen.
This year, all five nominated songs were performed by real or animated characters onscreen, making it easy for Shankman and Mechanic to cut out the nominated artists while also showing a bit of their songs’ performances.
Besides "The Weary Kind," which was written by Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett, the nominees are two Randy Newman songs from "The Princess and the Frog," "Almost There" and "Down in New Orleans," which are performed in the film by Anika Noni Rose and Dr. John, respectively; "Loin de Paname," a French-language song from the film "Paris 36" performed by Nora Arnezeder; and "Take It All" from the musical "Nine," which is performed onscreen by Marion Cotillard.
The winner here may be “The Princess and the Frog” -- which, with two nominations, will get a good chunk of two key musical numbers on the show.
