Variety‘s Jon Burlingame is reporting the Academy has nixed the eligibility of four potential original scores for this upcoming awards season. The scores deemed ineligible include Clint Mansell’s score for Black Swan, Michael Brook’s score for The Fighter and Carter Burwell’s scores for True Grit and The Kids are All Right.
I actually got in a discussion about this very thing this morning with some Oscar bloggers over email, surprised when the Chicago film critics named Mansell’s Black Swan the best original score of the year, primarily because it seemed like more of an adaptation of Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake” and that turns out to be the very reason it was disqualified. Burwell’s score for True Grit was axed because it was mostly based on 19th-century hymns, which are apparently not sufficiently “original.”
The scores for Fighter and Kids were reportedly given the heave-ho because “both films are filled with songs, leaving the scores to play second fiddle much of the time.”
Interestingly enough, another film mentioned in our email chain was Alexandre Desplat’s score for The King’s Speech, which features classical music excerpts such as Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5. It, however, was deemed eligible.
I wonder, what does this mean for Hans Zimmer’s score for Inception? I mean, is it original by Academy standards? If you haven’t seen it yet watch the video below and remember, Zimmer has already owned up to the fact Edith Piaf’s “Non, je ne regrette rien” was manipulated into the score directly.
The Academy’s rules state, “An original score is a substantial body of music that serves as original dramatic underscoring and is written specifically for the motion picture by the submitting composer.” Can that be said for the above piece of music?
