The National have missed out on a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Original Song after the original long-list of 39 was cut down to two today.
The US band were nominated for their track ‘Think You Can Wait‘, which features in the Thomas McCarthy directed Win-Win, while She And Him‘s Zooey Deschanel was also in with a shout thanks to the song ‘So Long‘, which is included on the Winnie the Pooh soundtrack.
However, the two tracks picked today (January 24th) when the nominees were unveiled for the 84th Oscars were ‘Man or Muppet‘, written by Flight Of The Conchords’ Bret McKenzie, and Sergio Mendes, Carlinhos Brown and Siedah Garrett’s ‘Real in Rio‘, from the film Rio.
Previous winners of the Best Original Song Oscar include Eminem with ‘Lose Yourself‘, and Bob Dylan, who provided ‘Things Have Changed‘ to the 2000 movie Wonder Boys.
This year’s Oscars ceremony will take place at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood on February 26th.
The nomination process for Best Original Song is flawed. Voters rate each song from 6 to 10. There is an incentive to give your preferred songs a “10” and the rest a “6” to maximize the impact of your vote. As a result all but the most uniformly popular songs (Muppets, Rio) are weighed down with low votes and can’t make the minimum threshold of 8.25. In a year with so many strong candidates it’s a shame that Oscar viewers will only be exposed to two songs…