In an effort to prevent a single musical from monopolizing the Original Song field at the Oscars, the Academy has changed the rules of the category. While movies can submit any number of songs they want, starting with the 2009 Oscars, only two songs can be nominated per film. The move comes after two consecutive years in which a musical received nods for three songs in the category, Enchanted in 2008 and Dreamgirls in 2007. In both cases, however, dominating with three nominated songs ultimately proved to a curse, as Once’s “Falling Slowly” won this year’s Oscar and Melissa Etheridge took the prize in 2007 for An Inconvenient Truth’s “I Need To Wake Up.” In addition, the Academy will allow DVDs of musical numbers to be sent to members of the voting committee who are unable to attend screenings. Had this new rule gone into effect last year, it’s possible Eddie Vedder would have received a nomination for his Golden Globe-winning work on Into the Wild’s soundtrack.

from rollingstone.com


better late than never

So now the rich white male needs an affirmative action program in order to be up to win an award. It's an odd world we live in.

:?:

This rule is really about some movies have too many good songs in them and the awards show would prefer to have a greater representation of movies up for the award than would come if they strictly took the best songs.

Seems absurd to call the award Oscar for Best Original Song if they limit the songs available to vote for not based by the song but on an affirmative action type program made to keep movie makers happy.

ok - what i didn't get was your "rich white men" thing. i agree that this rule makes no sense if tastes weren't debatable, but were these 3 songs from Enchanted better than anything on ITW? imo the academy didn't attack the root of the problem with this new rule. just a nomination to Ed would have made much more sense than 3 to Enchanted, who didn't win the damn statuette.

'cause you know, Ed cares about awards.

we both know he was crying into his eggs when he didn't get that nomination

*egg whites

At least 2 of those 3 Enchanted songs were not just worse than Ed's song, but were utterly abysmal and didn't belong anywhere near that stage. This is why I never watch the Grammys. People are just idiots about music, especially people in the class that votes at major awards ceremonies like these.