Two musicals forced the Oscars to change their rules

Earlier La La Land caused chaos at the Oscars.musicals put the ceremony into another mini-crisis in 2008. It was a year that saw box office hit “Bewitched” (a Disney children’s film starring Amy Adams) is nominated for three songs: “Happy Working Song,” “So Close” and “That’s How You Know.” These tunes played a ditty from the lesser-known Irish film Once Upon a Time called “Falling Slowly”.

The year before, another popular musical in the form of Dreamgirls (about a 1960s musical trio with 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. The winner that time was Davis Guggenheim’s “I Need to Wake Up” and Al Gore’s “An Convenient Truth.” It was the first time a documentary won an award.

Both results were somewhat controversial at the time, mainly because they were both prime examples of a popular mainstream film losing to a film that most people had either barely heard of (as was the case with Once Upon a Time ) or had mixed feelings about (in the case of An Inconvenient Truth). The results also raised an important question: Is it wise to allow a film to be nominated for three different songs in the first place?

Not only is multiple song nominations for one film unfair to any other films hoping for an Oscar shot, 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 know how things went, but there’s a chance that Dreamgirls and Charmed fell victim to split votes — because despite ideally being voted for With the Oscars judging each song individually, there’s always the risk that they’ll mentally lump all the songs from the same movie together. There is a fear of it partly why Disney has decided not to nominate ‘We Don’t Talk About Bruno’ from ‘Encanto’ for the 2022 Oscars, even though the song one of Disney’s biggest hits.

Dreamgirls and Charmed aren’t the only films to have three songs nominated for Oscars (the same happened with Disney’s Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King in the ’90s), but their return to -reverse losses helped draw attention to the problem. The controversy happened twice in a row, and the Academy had no interest in letting it happen a third time. So a new rule was announced in June 2008: film a maximum of two nominations for Best Original Song are possible.

This rule has been preserved until now. Not only did he limit the nominations to two, but he also seems to have encouraged films to base their Oscar hopes on just one song. After the 2008 rule change, the only other film to have two songs nominated is The Princess and the Frog in 2010, and both songs again lost to a film with one nomination. (This time it was “Crazy Heart” for the song “The Weary Kind.”) Over the next 15 years, Academy voters were consistently given a much wider range of films to choose from in the category. It’s a change few longtime Oscar fans can argue with.