Try new things! Zing! Zam! Pow! Not everyone’s down with the new “wacky and wild” Academy Awards Show format. In fact, some people like “Wall-E” songwriter Peter Gabriel are so annoyed and convinced musicians are getting short thrift, he’s decided to pull out of performing for the event according to Deadline Hollywood.
It’s been a minute since we gave a shit about the Oscars — Academy-blog prognosticators having annoyed us to death having examined every minuscule media fart and sniffed, “Does this smell like it’s shifted the collective thinking 4.5% due south?” — but isn’t Gabriel kind of the frontrunner here since Bruce Springsteen didn’t garner a nomination? Would it not be a pretty bad look to have the most name-brand performer not appear?
Apparently, the musical segment — one which audiences generally use as bathroom breaks, they’ve been so bad in recent years — has been severely cut and “[Oscar show producers] Larry Mark and Bill Condon, reduced the song segment to a medley of the three songs nominated for ‘Original Song.”
Now, we get the thinking here: The musical moments are generally gash, but we can understand why Gabriel feels like he has to bail. What, do we hear :90 seconds of his “Wall-E” song “Down To The Earth,” and then we segue right into “Slumdog Millionaire”s “Jai Ho”? Yeah, that’s not going to fly.
If this where the MTV Awards, you’d know that Gabriel would have just single-handedly cost himself an award, but fortunately the Oscars have a tiny bit more cred than that. They could always somehow change their minds and reel him back in, but as of right now it appears the Sledgehammer has walked.
Well Eminem didn’t show the year he won, so it might not hurt him. But yea, I don’t blame him for dropping out with this new medley-style song presentation. I agree the songs do drag the show down when it’s shit you can care less about (which is usually the case). I personally wouldn’t really want to see the Slumdog songs performed in their entirety. Both are a little one note, and you get the feel for them within the first minute. It’s different in the context of the movie when you have visuals to go with it, and even then, they don’t play near the whole song.