25 January 2012
VVN Music
Sergio Mendes and Siedah Garrett got Oscar nominations For Best Song while Elton John and Madonna were snubbed.
It's hard to say whether the sniping that Elton John and Madonna did after the Golden Globes had any effect, but their songs were not nominated in an Academy Awards list for Best Song that only has two entries.
To be fair, Madonna's Masterpiece, the song that won the Golden Globe, had already been ruled ineligible for the Oscar under their new rules that were initiated in 2009. In that change, no song that is solely used over the end credits can be nominated and that is where Masterpiece is used.
On the other hand, Elton John and Bernie Taupin's Hello, Hello from Gnomeo and Juliet just plain didn't make the cut. Once again, under the Academy's new rules, a song must attain a certain "rating" to be nominated. The members of the music branch of the academy rate each of the eligible songs on a scale from one to ten. The average of all the scores submitted must be 8.25 or higher to make it onto the final ballot.
That means that only two songs made that rating threshold, Man or Muppet from the movie The Muppets, written by Bret McKenzie (Flight of the Concords) and Real in Rio from the movie Rio, written by Sergio Mendes, Carlinhos Brown and Siedah Garrett. Mendes, of course, is the man behind such hits as The Look of Love and Fool on the Hill. Garrett is best remembered for dueting with Michael Jackson on I Just Can't Stop Loving You from the album Bad. In addition, she co-wrote Jackson's Man in the Mirror, toured as a backup singer with both Jackson and Madonna, and was previously nominated for a Best Song Oscar for Love You I Do from Dreamgirls.
