Before “La La Land” was causing chaos at the Oscars, musicals were putting the ceremony in another mini-crisis back in 2008. That was the year that saw the box office hit “Enchanted” (a Disney kids film starring Amy Adams) nominated for three songs: “Happy Working Song,” “So Close,” and “That’s How You Know.” Those tunes lost to a ditty from the lesser-known Irish film “Once,” titled “Falling Slowly.”
The year before, another popular musical in the form of “Dreamgirls” (which is about a 1960s music trio and stars Beyoncé) was also nominated for three songs (“Listen,” “Love You I Do,” and “Patience”), all of which also lost to a movie with only one nomination. That time the winner was “I Need to Wake Up” from Davis Guggenheim and Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” This was the first time a documentary had ever won the award.
Both outcomes were somewhat controversial at the time, mainly because they were both clear examples of the popular mass-appeal movie losing to a film that most people had either barely heard of (as was the situation with “Once”) or had divided thoughts on (in the case of “An Inconvenient Truth”). The outcomes also raised an important question: is it wise to let a movie be nominated for three different songs in the first place?
In 2008, the Academy limited the number of Best Original Song nominations a movie could get
Not only do multiple song nominations for one movie feel unfair to any other movies hoping to get their shot at an Oscar nod, but it also doesn’t seem like a great strategy for the movie itself. The Academy doesn’t release its voting data so we’ll never quite know how it all went down, but there’s a chance that “Dreamgirls” and “Enchanted” both fell victim to vote-splitting — because even though the Oscars voters should ideally judge each song individually, there’s always the risk that they’ll mentally lump all the songs from one movie together. Fear of this is partially why Disney chose not to nominate “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” from “Encanto” for the 2022 Oscars, even though that song is one of Disney’s biggest hits ever.
“Dreamgirls” and “Enchanted” aren’t the only movies to have three songs nominated for an Oscar (this also happened with Disney’s “Beauty and the Beast” and “The Lion King” in the ’90s), but their back-to-back losses helped to shine a spotlight on the problem. The controversy happened twice in a row and the Academy had no interest in letting it happen a third time. So, June 2008, it announced a new rule: a movie can only get two Best Original Song nominations max.
That rule has remained in place ever since. Not only has it limited the nominations to two, but it also seems to have encouraged movies to only base their Oscar hopes on one song. Since the ’08 rule change, the only movie to have had two songs nominated is “The Princess and the Frog” in 2010, and both those songs once again lost to a movie with only one nomination. (This time it was “Crazy Heart” for its song “The Weary Kind.”) In the subsequent 15 years, Academy voters have been consistently given a much wider pool of movies to choose from in this category. It’s a change that very few long-time Oscar fans can argue with.
