When the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced Oscar nominations in January, I had hoped it would nominate "WALL-E," an animated movie, for Best Picture. Of course, this would require them to wobble just a tad outside their heavily trodden nomination path. And, sadly, it did not fail to disappoint.
The Academy instead decided to tread down their familiar road of rewarding gaudy showmanship and sentimentality. They continued to celebrate Hollywood love, death, historical reenactments and the Holocaust. "The Reader," a movie that has drawn more attention for its skin scenes than any real artistic merits, got a best picture nomination over "WALL-E."
So what's one of the consolation prizes for "WALL-E?" The "prestigious" Best Original Song Oscar? I can appreciate reaching across the entertainment aisle to the music industry, giving them a "We couldn't have done it without you" pat on the back. However, the Academy should have pulled the plug on this award 15 years ago when Disney stopped making quality musicals.
Most of the annual winners are not worthy of any sort of award. Case in point: Try to name five winners of the award in the last 10 years. It's nearly impossible. Each year, the nominations go to five songs (three this year) seemingly chosen from a pool of about 10. If you had a song good enough to win an award, would you really sell or donate it to a movie director when you could cash in even greater with it on your own record?
The Academy also insists on performing these songs, bloating telecast time. They inevitably end up being background noise during your bathroom break. Who was really excited to hear "Raise it Up" from "August Rush" (this is a movie, not a performer, by the way) at last year's Oscars? If there is to be any performance at the Oscars, it should only be from the winner, and even that ought to be conditional on some sort of interactive public vote.
There are some ways to overhaul and fix the award, though. The Academy could expand the award so that any song released that year and is featured in a movie is included. This would have meant "Paper Planes" by M.I.A., which appeared in "Slumdog Millionaire," could have earned a nomination this year (provided they dropped the rule prohibiting songs featuring sampling).
Another way to increase the integrity of the award would be to drop the whole "best song" title and switch it to "best soundtrack." Half of the 1960s and 70s songs from any Quentin Tarantino movie are going to meet virgin ears, but that doesn't mean they aren't great. Furthermore, the amount of time soundtrack producers spend digging up songs is often overlooked.
Even implementing these changes, however, the best fix is still to just get rid of the Best Original Song Oscar. It would put an end to the laughable charade that the Academy is somehow a legitimate musical judge. You have to go back to 1994 to find a year when even three songs deserved to be in this category, and that was just because "The Lion King" happened to be released that year.
By and large, there just aren't good songs that artists write specifically for movies. Why, on a night when we're supposed to recognize greatness, do we celebrate a category of such consistent mediocrity?
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