Film Tracks Won’t Cover “Fraudulent Popularity Contest”

This is the second time a notable site has decided to bow out of covering the awards race. After Brokeback Mountain lost to Crash, my favorite awards database, fennec.org, decided to call it quits.¬† IMDb and Wikipedia have pretty much taken over — but Fennec was the best. Anyway, now Film Tracks has decided that the Original Score category is so ridiculous that it isn’t even worth covering (thanks to reader Bowie) anymore:

“After decades of frustration with the ridiculous methodology and dubious merit of the “Best Original Score” categories (and their variations) at major awards ceremonies, Filmtracks will no longer provide coverage of such fraudulent popularity contests. Notes about the award consideration earned by scores and composers will continue to be marked in the individual reviews and composer tributes, but no special mention of the major international awards (nominations or winners) will be made on Filmtracks’ homepage or in the awards section of this site. That latter directory of information will, in the forthcoming weeks, be stripped of its database of past winners of Oscars and Golden Globes and will concentrate on only those awards published by this site and its esteemed peers within the soundtrack community.

All of the major awarding bodies that include a film music category, including the Golden Globes, BAFTA’s, Oscars, and Grammy’s, are, to some extent, guilty of the transgressions of illegitimacy outlined below, though the Academy Awards, considered the pinnacle of this group, are especially the target of this condemnation. While film music collectors of the 2000’s have been stunned by the senseless awarding of two Oscars to Gustavo Santaolalla (while the legendary Jerry Goldsmith won that award just once in his entire illustrious career), the problems with those golden statues go back many decades. Whether it was Vangelis’ Chariots of Fire, a one trick pony, defeating a classic like John Williams’ Raiders of the Lost Ark in 1981, or a flash in the pan like Herbie Hancock’s ‘Round Midnight astoundingly finishing ahead of both Goldsmith’s Hoosiers and Ennio Morricone’s The Mission in 1986, there can be no excuse for such hideously uninformed choices.”

The reason for the general stupidity of the AMPAS choices in particular is two-fold; procedural and popular. This is a group that has changed the rules so many times, even altered the number of scores nominated back and forth through the years, that it’s impossible to evaluate their nominations because of asinine restrictions on eligibility. For instance, twelve composers were nominated for The Color Purple and three won for The Last Emperor while several legitimate scores ten years later were ruled ineligible because the duties were split between multiple composers. Eventually, AMPAS required detailed cue sheet attribution in order to be deemed eligible for a nomination, and collaborative composers like Hans Zimmer eventually decided to not even try to submit their scores for consideration. Likewise, the rule about the use of previously existing material has changed several times throughout the last few decades, with some senseless, floating percentage applied to scores to determine if they contain enough new material to be eligible. The most recent folly in these regards led to the initial ruling of Howard Shore’s The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers as ineligible and then statues were then handed to both Shore for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King and Santaolalla for Babel, the latter making use of previously available material that, in the most memorable portions of the film, wasn’t even the composer’s own.

And now on to the Oscar part of it:

Even if you can stomach the eligibility issues that plague these awards, it’s difficult to tolerate the reasoning of the voting members. There are general unspoken rules about nominations and winners, and they never, never, never point votes in the direction of the truly superior scores in any given year. When things like John Williams’ Star Wars or Schindler’s List sweep through the majority of the awards, those triumphs enjoy the right result for the wrong reasons. Foremost in this behavior is the rule that dictates that the “Best Picture” nominees will often directly correlate with the “Best Score” ones, even if that extends to the realm of the insane by nominating James Newton Howard for Michael Clayton and ignoring his score for Lady in the Water. Another rule pertains to the preference for cute scores for animated films in the wake of the Alan Menken era; though good, these works are often short and derivative. Nostalgia is a typical favorite of voting members, stubbornly preferring substandard works by older, popular favorites rather than spectacular successes by the younger generation (until an unofficial waiting period of five to ten years is met). Finally, there are politics to be played, and the Los Angeles industry liberals would undoubtedly nominate Danny Elfman for Milk because not only did the film meet their political agenda, but Elfman, who started a political action committee to fight Governor Sarah Palin that year, personally did the same.

Well, to be fair, Danny Elfman could practically sneeze and it would be nominated for original score.

The point here is this. This is usually how the Oscar branches throw in their own choice for Best Pic. They get to nominate Best Pic and they can get to add to that love by nominating Score, or Cinematography, or Editing into the pile. This is how films get into the race with multiple nominations — most of the time (not all of the time) this is not deserved across the board and is just a reflection of “liking” the movie, or the director, or the famous composer or famous editor. Every once in a while it is greatly deserved.

While the film composers select the nominees, the entire branch votes on the winners. So is it any surprise that they choose either the score of the film that swept or the music they think is “prettiest”?

The populist element to the Oscars is what makes them what they are. While they aren’t quite the People’s Choice Awards or the MTV Movie Awards, they aren’t so esoteric that the average person can’t play along. I get what the film Film Tracks folks are saying. And I’m not saying they’re wrong. But I am saying that the very thing that bugs Film Tracks about the Oscars is what has made them so fascinating these 82 years. They are hated and respected all at once. They are prestigious enough that people still care how they turn out. But that doesn’t mean they have ever been in the business of rewarding “the best.” So many other factors are in play.

It isn’t Ms. Right; it’s Ms. Right Now.

Read more at the source.