Cinema Science

This is bad news. There Will Be Blood easily had my favorite score of the year. Taken from Red Carpet District.

Jonny Greenwood's original score for "There Will Be Blood" has been ruled ineligible by the music branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

The news comes on the heels of last week's Best Foreign Language Film debacle, which left the two most critically acclaimed efforts of the year in that category out of contention (Romania's "4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days" and France's "Persepolis").

(Pete Hammond is also reporting on this over at The Envelope, but there is much more to the story, which has been fluttering in the wind throughout the weekend.)

The disqualification has been attributed to a designation within Rule 16 of the Academy's Special Rules for Music Awards (5d under "Eligibility"), which excludes "scores diluted by the use of tracked themes or other pre-existing music."

Greenwood's score contains roughly 35 minutes of original recordings and roughly 46 minutes of pre-existing work (including selections from the works of Arvo Pärt, as well as pieces in the public domain). Peripheral augmentation to the score included sporadic but minimal useage (15 minutes) of the artist's 2006 composition "Popcorn Superhet Receiver."

"Popcorn Superhet Receiver" is a 20-minute work commissioned by the BBC in 2005. The piece premiered at London's Queen Elizabeth Hall in November of 2006.

All musical inclusions were indicated on the score's cue sheet, of which the Academy has been in possession since early December. The organization had over a month to run over rules and eligibility, sending out reminder sheets to Academy voters that included Greenwood's score for consideration along the way. Other scores that were deemed ineligible include Alan Menken's "Enchanted" and Michael Brook's "Into the Wild," both due to the "predominant use of songs."

Paramount Vantage was alerted to the ineligibility of "Into the Wild" far in advance. The situation with "Blood," however, has come at the last minute, catching the studio entirely off guard.

Vantage was made aware of the Academy's "Blood" decision on January 19, seven days after balloting closed. Greenwood himself first received word via postal mail from the Academy at his home in London on January 17.

According to the studio, the Academy's decision has come in part due to a situation which arose with Nino Rota's score for "The Godfather" in 1972, which was pulled from the list of nominees after it was discovered that the film's love theme was used in another film, 1958's "Fortunella." The reasoning even in that instance seems flimsy in the face of the fact that the film's sequel won the original score Oscar and featured the exact same theme.

Sources at the studio say that, though they are baffled by the surprising turn of events, they respect the Academy's decision