Idolator

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has banned the mailings of all "recordings, sheet music (and) musicvideos of eligible songs or scores" by potential Oscar nominees to Academy Awards voters. The ostensible reason: The Academy wanted to make sure that voters were basing their Oscar-worthy judgments on the use of nominated music "within the context of the movies," and not on the strength of the songs or scores themselves.

"There's always the danger that if one is just listening to the CD, you're obviously not doing that," said Ric Robertson, the executive administrator for the Academy. This move is making a lot of people very unhappy: In addition to the scores of Randy Newman fans in the Academy who have been counting on the Oscar-time mailouts as a way to get his latest songs free of charge, there's also grumbling coming from composers, some of whom are annoyed that it'll be harder to discern between original compositions and previously written music:

Publicist Ray Costa, who represents John Powell, Christopher Young and other composers, noted that many scores today contain music that the credited composer didn't actually write — the result of a trend in which directors increasingly choose to license pre-existing music in addition to the new, original score — and the CDs can help to clarify the distinctions in the minds of voters.

"The Academy has had very specific rules about that," Costa said. "The benefit of the CD is that people aren't credited for music they didn't write."

As another Acad member pointed out, this move sounds good on paper, "but if you had a song or score in contention, wouldn't you want it sent to members?"

In 1986, Herbie Hancock won the Oscar for "'Round Midnight," even though much of that score was not original. Last year's "Babel" win was also criticized in some quarters because, in addition to the original Gustavo Santaolalla music, there was music licensed from earlier works and music by other composers.

Well, if Fergie's cover of "Barracuda" for Shrek 3 gets nominated for Best Song, then we'll definitely see that these lack-of-CD rules have made crediting conditions little bit cloudier. Or that the entire Academy has, in protest, divested itself of its ears for this year's competition.

Academy bans CD music mailings [Variety]