Tom Hanks once confided that, while watching the big musical production numbers is often the lamest part of the Academy Awards telecast, "when you see them live, they look kind of cool." As with so much else in life, we'll have to take Tom Hanks's word for it. Unfortunately for those in the audience at this year's Oscars show, the musical component of this year's event started out downsized and is getting smaller by the minute. In previous years, the people in charge of picking out five "original songs" to nominate for that treasured category have rolled up their sleeves and worked with what God gave them, forcing the people onstage to read out words that were never meant to fgo together, such as "Love Theme from The Towering Inferno." (It's also because of the Best Original Song category that such movies as The Karate Kid, Part II, Yes, Giorgio, Mannequin, and Whiffs can truthfully claim to have been Oscar nominees and so may well turn up on Turner Classic Movies during their annual "Thirty Days of Oscar" celebration, while Robert Osborne smiles into the camera and wishes he were dead.) This year, though, the category consists only of three nominees. There's a precedent for this: it happened in 1988 (when Carly Simon's theme song for Working Girls beat out a Phil Collins tune from the Phil Collins movie--you see what I mean about words that were never meant to go together?--Buster and something from Bagdad Cafe), and again in 2005, when the relative lack of competition turned out to be windfall for those musical craftsmen Three 6 Mafia. (They won for their contribution to the soundtrack of Hustle & Flow, "It's Hard Out There for a Pimp", a sentiment calculated to get Hollywood agents and studio chiefs standing on their chairs screaming, "Can I get an amen?") But this year, the three songs were selected from a grand total of two movies: Slumdog Millionaire and WALL-E. This in spite of the fact that anyone who's been to the movies more than a couple of times in the past few months has had Bruce Springsteen's song from The Wrestler imprinted permanently in their brains, even if they haven't seen the movie. Now comes word that Peter Gabriel, whose WALL-E theme "Down to Earth" has already won a Grammy for Best Song from a Motion Picture, has pulled out of the ceremony to protest the decision that he would only be allowed to perform a brief snippet of the song as part of a medley. Gabriel will be in the audience in case he wins; "I’m an old fart," he says, "and it’s not going to do me any harm to make a little protest. But the ceremony will be fun and I’m looking forward to it." So anyone who volunteers to take his place and perform part of the song on stage will do so knowing that the composer is staring at him trying to kill him with hate rays.
Gabriel, who discusses his gripes with the Academy in a video posted at his website, co-wrote "Down to Earth" with Thomas Newman, the son of the legendary film composer Alfred Newman. (He and Randy Newman are cousins.) It's the first Oscar nomination of Gabriel's career, though he has composed three well-regarded original film scores, for Birdy, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Rabbit-Proof Fence. And he has a special place in Oscar history for his appearance at the 1998 awards, where he sang Randy Newman's theme song for Babe: Pig in the City.
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