People will dream up any conspiracy theory they can these days. The two we’ve heard today/yesterday are that Bruce Springsteen’s “The Wrestler” song was made ineligible because he put the track on his latest album, Working On A Dream, as a bonus song and the second being how the Swedish Vampire film “Let The Right One In” was an outright snub.
Let’s clear up a few things for those not paying attention:
According to the AMPAS rules, the motion picture must be first released in the country submitting it no earlier than October 1, 2007, and no later than September 30, 2008.” “Let The Right One In” didn’t come out in Sweden until October 24, 2008. So that blows that theory of the water. It’s eligible next year. However that doesn’t necessarily mean that Sweden will select it as their Best Picture offering next fall. If they don’t, save your outrage for Sweden, not the Academy (hey, they might be fuck ups too, but we’re all for placing the blame where it rightly belongs). Perhaps you can boycott IKEA in protest.
As for Springsteen’s incredibly soulful song? It wasn’t disqualified over silly technicalities, it was overlooked by the Academy plain and simple. It was selected as one of the 49 song explicitly eligible for the Oscars, so try again. Yes, it’s unfortunate, but again, why is anyone surprised when the Academy votes like they’re on Mars? We’re sure more excuses as to why 2+2 didn’t equal 5 today will come out shortly.
seriously, proof read your posts. all of them.
Speculation on Springsteen snub: he won back in ’93 (?) for “Philadelphia” and the Academy probably viewed as a “he’s won already, let’s nominate other folks” sort of thing. Plus, only nominating three songs cuts down the runtime for the actual show in terms of number of performances. So perhaps it was on terms of economics?
Not like Springsteen’ll give shit or anything. He’s the fucking boss.
Thing is, I was seriously looking forward to seeing Bruce play the track live on Oscar night, just him and his guitar up there alone, but now they had to go and fucking ruin it. I expected it to be the highlight of the show honestly. It probably would’ve been like Elliott Smith’s performance of Miss Misery, another failing on Oscars long list of Song failures. Somebody stop me.
The slumdog songs, particularly Jai Ho will be a show-stopper. Tons of people on stage, a big dance spectacle. I bet it’s awesome.