Best Song Another of Oscar Changes

Published by Jeff Leins on: June 29th, 2009

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has made another change to its annual Oscar telecast.  Just days after the announcement that “Best Picture” would expand to ten nominees, the organization has altered the voting process for “Best Original Song.”

Instead of selecting three or five of the best songs of the year for the category, the nominations will depend upon a different scoring system.  Each song will be rated on a 10-point scale and those that receive over 8.25 will be eligible for nomination.  If no song makes the rank, there will be no “Best Original Song” category that year. If only one makes it, the second higher song will compete for Oscar votes.  The maximum is still five nominees.

The music branch said the move was made to “raise the quality of the songs,” but the announcement seems contradictory.  On the one hand, the Academy wants to protect the integrity of “Best Song” by only including quality picks, but at the same time the organization is diluting the “Best Picture” category with more selections and diminishing what it means to be nominated.  On top of that, the 8.25 scoring is applying a very mathematical system to an otherwise artistic medium.  It doesn’t make sense.

The Academy should be focusing on the strict rules in the process, not altering the traditional categories themselves.  It’s sister category, “Best Original Score,” has been a hotbed of official contention in the past few years after There Will Be Blood was disqualified for sampling previous work by the same artist and last year The Dark Knight’s score eligibility was re-evaluated.  “Best Foreign Film” is a broken system of one possible entry from each country rather than a competition between the best non-American films.

Or better yet, the Academy needs to be discussing ways to make the telecast more interesting for everyone not just industry suits and cinephiles.  The ceremony is still too clunky and long, and neither of these changes does much to solve Oscar’s major problem.