Oscar song preview

It was one of the funniest lines at last year's Oscar show, a joke made possible through the efforts of the unpredictable music branch of the academy.

"For those of you who are keeping score at home, I just want to make something very clear," host Jon Stewart announced as the night's most raucous winners partied backstage. "Martin Scorsese, zero Oscars. Three 6 Mafia, one."

A few minutes earlier, the best song Oscar had just gone to a profane rap lament called "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp," written and sung by members of the Atlanta-based rap collective Three 6 Mafia.

The win provided ample comic fodder for Stewart -- "It just got a little easier up here for a pimp" was another of his lines -- and meant that in three of the previous four years, the best song award had gone to a surprising choice: two rap songs, "Pimp" and Enimen's "Lose Yourself," and the Spanish-language ballad "Al Otro Lado Del Rio."

What had happened to the category that brought us "You Light Up My Life," "Raindrops Keep Fallin' on My Head" and "The Way We Were"?

In fact, for years the best song category has been stirring up talk the morning after Oscar shows and Oscar nominations. "It's an exciting category," laughs Arthur Hamilton, a governor of the music branch and vice president of the academy. "It always seems to be filled with commotion and controversy."

Best song is the only category where, in many years, a nominee's entire achievement is presented on the Oscar telecast: actors get 30-second clips, costume designers get a few sketches, but the song nominees are performed start-to-finish, except in years when they're sandwiched into a medley.

The category has been a thorn in the side of Oscar show producers, who've wondered (not publicly, but they have wondered) why they're faced with staging a left-field number like South Park's "Blame Canada" instead of a Madonna song from Austin Powers, or a French chorale rather than Mick Jagger's Golden Globe-winning "Old Habits Die Hard."

Best song nominees have been chosen by the studios' music departments, by the entire membership of the academy, by special committees, by the music branch, and now by branch members who attend a special presentation. The category has drawn criticism for what's been included and what's been left out; it rarely gets respect but it always gets attention, even as the music branch regularly tinkers with its rules and procedures in an attempt, says Hamilton, to "readjust, realign and refine" the process.

"The branch does enjoy changing the rules," says songwriter and composer Marc Shaiman, a five-time nominee whose two best-song nominations came for "Blame Canada" and for "A Wink and a Smile" from "Sleepless in Seattle." "They always seem to be trying to figure out how to make it be something other than just a popularity contest, and I tip my hat to them for that."

And as for the results… "The way they do it now sounds sensible," says the acerbic songwriter Randy Newman, whose 17 nominations are almost evenly split between best song and best score nods. (He's nominated again this year for "Our Town" from Cars.)

"But of course the nominations can be dodgy. If you're dealing with a big picture, or a picture that people really love, they'll sometimes nominate it. The nominations mean more than the award because they're voted on by musicians, but even the music branch has nominated some scores and songs that its hard to understand, if you're a musician."

Certainly, classic songs have won, and been nominated, in the 70-plus years he category has been in existence: "Over the Rainbow," "The Way You Look Tonight," "White Christmas," "Baby, It's Cold Outside," all the way through to Isaac Hayes' "Theme from Shaft" and Bruce Springsteen's "Streets of Philadelphia." Still, the omissions are legendary, starting with "I Only Have Eyes for You" in 1934, the first year the category existed.

The classics that didn't get nominated fill chapters in the Great American Songbook: "Our Love Is Here to Stay," "One for My Baby," "At Last," "You Make Me Feel So Young," "Thank Heaven for Little Girls," "New York, New York." The song that's come to be synonymous with song and dance on film, "That's Entertainment," was bypassed; so were Elvis ("Jailhouse Rock"), the Beatles ("A Hard Day's Night"), Bob Dylan ("Knockin' on Heaven's Door"), the Bee Gees ("Stayin' Alive") and Prince ("Purple Rain").

In 1937, the third year of the category, the Bing Crosby trifle "Sweet Lelani" won over a slate of nominees that included only one bona fide standard, "They Can't Take That Away from Me." The songs that went unnominated that same year included "Hooray for Hollywood," "In the Still of the Night," "Let's Call the Whole Thing Off," "Nice Work if You Can Get It," "Someday My Prince Will Come," "They All Laughed," "Too Marvelous for Words" and "Whistle While You Work."