Original Song Eligibility List = Lots of Opportunities For Oscar Night Celebrity Live-Singing!
Tuesday, December 11, 2012 at 6:22PM
NATHANIEL R in Adele, Bond James Bond, Dolly Parton, Original Song, Oscar Ceremonies, Oscars (12), ScarJo, animated films

Now that Skyfall has been declared eligible can Adele finally break the unofficial NO NOMS FOR BOND thing that's been going on forever?As you may have heard, 75 songs have qualified for consideration for Oscar's Best Original Song Category...and not just from animated films. I love this category in my more imaginary moments neither because of what's been nominated over the years (ewww) nor any belief that songwriting is a particularly valid "filmmaking achievement". I only love it for its potential to provide my favorite night of the year with some entertaining interludes -- I love acceptance speeches but you gotta break the night up for variety's sake. Sadly, Oscar has been mucking with this category for so long that it almost never reaches its potential of providing 5 awesome short breaks from people standing at podiums, preferrably while also letting various celebrities sing live to us. In the year of Les Miz it will be a great shame if there isn't live singing on Hollywood's High Holy Night.

But I keep the dream alive and pray that one day some Academy executive will realize that the only thing the category is good for is putting celebrities on stage in a different context than acceptance speeches or merely to introduce yet another mind-numbing montage of something that has nothing to do with the films we happen to be celebrating this annum. So with that in mind, I'm placing in ALL CAPS the performer of the song if it's somebody who it would immediately enrage if they chose not to invite them to sing it to us so that they could shove all the songs into one medley for, like, Miley Cyrus to sing or something (remember how obsessed the Oscars were with having Miley Cyrus present there for awhile?! Yeah, that was... well, let's not dwell.)

LIST AND MORE AFTER THE JUMP

ELIGIBLE SONGS
bold text indicates official music video or the scene from the film embedded

 

 

 

Imagine all the reaction shots from Nicole Kidman!

Oooh, they could have Greta Gerwig introduce it & do it!
Prep us for her Frances Ha! Oscar run next year?

The Odd Life of Timothy Green was atrocious but how sweet would it be to have the Once duo back on the Oscar stage? 

Mark Duplass at the Oscars? That'd be unexpected. But Ryan Miller sings it on the soundtrack.

They've ignored Bond films for ANYTHING for almost my entire lifetime. If Adele gives the series a nom here we'll surely get to see her perform AND Bond will get his first nom in 30 years

 

One of the frustrating things about this category is that even if you have a good song and good singer -- take Fiona Apple and "Dull Tool" -- it is sometimes used so extraneoussly to the movie that it would be super weird to vote for it. Apple's song is just tossed off wrecklessly as background music in a stupid bike/car scene in This is 40 if I remember correctly. I much prefer end credit songs that play in full to half-assed uses of songs you barely notice within a movie. However, if you build a whole scene around a song and the song is good, you really deserve to be a part of the discussion of Oscar + Song. So FYC: Dolly Parton's gorgeous lullaby "From Here to the Moon and Back" from the otherwise supernoisy and obnoxious Joyful Noise

Which songs are you rooting for? Or perhaps you'd like the category demolished for good?

Article originally appeared on The Film Experience (http://thefilmexperience.net/).
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