Two musicals forced Oscar to change the rules

Before that “La La Land” caused chaos at the OscarsIn 2008, the musical caused the ceremony in another small crisis. It was the year when box office hit “Enchanted” (Disney children's film starring Amy Adams) nominated for three songs: “Happy Working Song”, “So Close” and “That's How You Know”. These tunes were lost to the lesser-known Irish film “Once” under the title “Slowly Falling”.

The year before, another popular musical in the form of Dreamgirls (which is about a 1960s musical trio and stars Beyoncé) was also nominated for three songs (“Listen”, “Love You I Do” and “Patience”). all of which also lost to the film with only one nomination. “I Need to Wake Up” by Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore's “An Inconvenient Truth” won then. This was the first time a documentary received an award.

Both results were quite controversial at the time, mainly because they were both clear examples of a popular mass appeal film losing out to a film that most people had barely heard of (as was the case with Once Upon a Time ) or was divided opinion. (In the case of “an inconvenient truth”). The results also raised an important question: Is it wise to let a movie get nominated for three different songs in the first place?

Multiple song nominations for one film not only feels unfair to other films hoping to win Oscars, but it also doesn't seem like a great strategy for the film itself. The Academy doesn't release its voting data, so we'll never really know how it all worked out, but it's possible that both “Dreamgirls” and “Enchanted” fell victim to vote-splitting because, while ideally Oscar voters should evaluate each song individually , there's always the risk that they'll mentally piece together all the songs from the same movie. There is a fear of it partly why Disney chose not to nominate “We Don't Talk About Bruno” from “Encanto” for the 2022 Oscars, even though the song is one of Disney's biggest hits of all time.

“Dreamgirls” and “Enchanted” aren't the only films with three Oscar-nominated songs (it also happened with Disney's “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Lion King” in the 1990s), but their back-to-back. – back losses helped draw attention to the problem. Controversy happened twice in a row, and the Academy had no interest in letting it happen a third time. So in June 2008, it announced a new rule: film only two Best Original Song nominations are possible.

This rule has been in effect since then. Not only has this limited the nominations to two, but it also seems to have encouraged films to base their Oscar hopes on just one song. Since the 2008 rule change, the only film to have two songs nominated is The Princess and the Frog in 2010, and both of those songs lost to a film with only one nomination. (This time it was “Crazy Heart” for “The Weary Kind”.) In the following 15 years, Academy voters have been consistently given a much wider range of films to choose from in this category. It's a change few longtime Oscar fans can argue with.