Academy Awards Change Best Original Song Rules

The Academy Awards recently upped the amount of Best Picture nominees from five films to 10 (Rolling Stone movie critic Peter Travers is still wondering "Why?"), and now the Oscar rule changes have seeped into the Best Original Song category. After this year saw only three songs nominated, including two from Slumdog Millionaire, the Music Branch Executive Committee will now require that only songs that average an 8.25 score — songs are rated from 6 to 10 by Academy members — can be nominated in the category, Billboard.biz reports. If no songs average 8.25, then that Oscar year will not feature a Best Original Song category.

If only one song clears the 8.25 barrier, then the next highest-ranked track will join that song as a nominee, regardless of its score, just so there's a little suspense on Oscar night. The old Best Original Song category only called for an 8.5 required aggregated score, with a maximum of five and a minimum of three songs in the category each year. However, as the Best Picture category has doubled, that requires more screen time, and the Best Original Song was one of the casualties of the clock. Under the new rules, fewer nominees also means less performances, however the category will still have a five-song maximum if the votes warrant it.

As it stands now, Academy voters will still be shown clips of the song being used in a movie when voting on the category, a practice that has affected songs like Prince's Happy Feet contribution "Song of the Heart," Bruce Springsteen's "The Wrestler" and Eddie Vedder's Into the Wild track "Guaranteed" — tunes that soundtrack the end credits but lose a lot their meaning when isolated from the rest of the film. All three songs won the Golden Globes' Best Original Song category, yet none earned even an Oscar nod.

Related Stories:
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• Oscars Snub Springsteen, Celebrate "Slumdog" As Nominations Are Announced
• Oscars: Depp and Blanchett Nominated, Vedder and Greenwood Shut Out

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Song Stories

“Too Close”

Next | 1998

Next was formed in Minneapolis when the uncle of Terry "T-Low" and Raphael "Tweety" Brown, who was a gospel choir director, introduced the brothers to Robert Lavelle "R.L." Huggar. Sounds of Blackness singer Ann Nesby groomed the R&B group before handing them over to Naughty by Nature's KayGee, who wrote and produced "Too Close." The idea for the song was sparked "from a conversation we had with several girls at a nightclub," explained T-Low. "It's talking about the club scene, with guys getting out of hand and the female telling him to back up, asking, 'What are you doing?'" 

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