91 Tunes Eligible for Oscar's "Best Original Song" Category

Oscar's music branch has sorted through all the tuneful submissions and made two gigantic lists. They've deemed 145 original film scores eligible for "Best Original Score" and 91 songs eligible in Oscar's most divisive category "Best Original Song". As long as I've been alive people have objected to this category even existing (when far more prevalents crafts like "casting" and "stunts" don't have Oscar categories) but without it we wouldn't get all those memorable musical performances on the show. Please note the word "memorable" comes with no connotations as to quality. You can be memorable for all sorts of reasons from brilliance to embarrassing yourself!

This year has the usual array of films you've never heard of, plentiful documentary and cartoon theme songs, songs from movies you saw but didn't realize they had a song (Sully anyone?!), and a whole lot of Sia from multiple movies though her best shots are probably the theme song from The Eagle Huntress or Zootopia's "Try Everything" (people think of it as a Shakira song but Sia wrote it so she'd get the nomination). Since single movies are only allowed two nominees in this category (the rule was changed after the 2007 Oscar race with 3 nominations from Enchanted), you'll find that most movies don't submit more than that, now. Pop Star: Never Stop Never Stopping only went with one, Sing Street narrowed their plentiful options down to two and La La Land submitted three. Sadly Hail Caesar either didn't submit or they deemed "No Dames" ineligible, we're guessing the former.  The 91 songs are listed after the jump with their videos so you can hear them where we could find them... 

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Annie Award Nominations: Kubo, Zootopia, The Red Turtle...

Nominations for the 44th annual Annie Awards have been announced. Zootopia leads with 11 nominations with Laika's Kubo and the Two Strings just behind with 10 nominations. Because the Annies have two separate feature categories (the regular one plus an "indie" category which basically means "foreign") you can probably safely assume that the eventual Oscar lineup will be some mishmash between the two.

nominees and more after the jump...

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The Finalists in All "Short Film" Categories

Oscar announced the finalists in the documentary short film category a month ago but now we have the live action and animated finalists as well so the charts have been updated with links and information.

Inner Working

As expected Pixar's Piper which played before Finding Dory and Disney's hilarious Inner Workings, which is playing before Moana are both in the running. But if you're interested in seeing glimpses of their competition for those coveted five nominations, all the other trailers are after the jump...

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27 Films Eligible for Best Animated Feature

[UPDATE: Variety shared a list of 22 a week ago jumping the gun a week ago and we followed suit. Now we've updated on 11/11 with 5 additional titles since the actual list has been revealed]

Twenty-seven films are officially in the mix for Oscar nominations for Best Animated Feature. Since the threshold to trigger a five wide shortlist in the category is only sixteen, we'll get five nominees this year. As per usual in this category the US will dominate but one or two of the nominations will surely be nabbed by formidable and lower profile threats from France and/or Japan. The list and a few notes follow...

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Swing Tarzan Swing: Disney's 1999 Animated Take

We've reached the penultimate episode of our Tarzan series. Now sailing into Disney wilds...

by Nathaniel R

For over half a century in film and television storytellers didn't think Tarzan needed an origin plot but when the movies told it (Greystoke, 1984), it was as if everyone had always wanted to. Why not Disney then? Disney hadn't quite run out of classic fairytales to adapt by the mid-nineties but they were shifting their focus to boys. This was arguably due to their gargantuan back-to-back biggest-ever successes of Aladdin (1992) and The Lion King (1994), two animated features that deviated from their princess focus. Enter Hercules and then Tarzan. Neither were girly fairytales but both were still firmly embedded in fantasy and heightened enough for musical numbers.

Sort of.

By the time Tarzan rolled into town, Disney executives had clearly begun to wonder if audiences were done with the musical part of their Animated Musicals because Tarzan is only a musical in the sense that non-diegetic adult contemp ear worms keep popping up. They arrive without warning, with all the subtlety of a slasher movie jump scare.

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