Oscar City

Compiled by Lukas Kendall

The Oscar discussion went through the roof following last Monday's ceremonies. First, we made an error: the music heard over the In Memoriam segment was "Apassionata" from The Passage by Michael J. Lewis. Dragonheart by Randy Edelman was used during the Oscar's birthday segment, highlighting all 70 years of Best Picture winners. By the way, this happens every year, that the Academy producers track some Hollywood elegy over the RIP montage (last year it was Legends of the Fall) and then viewers fall all over themselves to identify it.

From: "Robert J. Wood" <rw003g@uhura.cc.rochester.edu>

I was just wondering how you felt about the absence of Seven Years in Tibet from the nominated scores this year. For sheer musical value and ability to stand alone from the movie (which I acknowledge as not being film scores' intent), Seven Years in Tibet is absolutely impeccable. It is chilling. In my opinion. Its rejection makes me question how the academy goes about picking best score. It seemed as though the Williams score served the movie so nicely, and I know how a score betters a movie is part of the judging criteria. Why, for instance, was Amistad nominated in its place?

Um, it's a Spielberg film? Robert had some additional comments for which we don't have room--as always, use our message board to sound off in a completely unpoliced way.

From: Eric Wemmer <dragon7@icanect.net>

I am sure none of us are surprised by Horner winning the awards for the dramatic score, but can you really tell me that Anne Dudley's The Full Monty is a better (the best?) effort than Zimmer's As Good as it Gets, JNH's My Best Friend's Wedding, or Elfman's Men In Black. This is to take nothing away from Ms. Dudley, who is quite talented, but I really think Elfman was the clear far and away winner here. I am proud of him for being nominated twice. As far as I am concerned, he should have definitely won on at least MIB.

I was astonished by the Full Monty win, since I am told there's around 7 minutes of original music in the film. They should just call it "Best Music Supervision." Jeff Bond later interviewed Dudley and she was very nice, so we're like, no longer furious about her win. Ah, the way the world works.

Here are some comments about last Monday's column on this site downplaying the awards by Jeff Eldridge:

From: Dale Dworak <ddecatur@voy.net>

I'll bet the house that the comments "Oscars don't really mean much" and "Oscars have about as much significance as a People Magazine Poll" won't be anywhere to be found on your website in 2000 if John Williams wins for Star Wars: Episode One.

From: John Perkins <notehead@teleport.com>

Oscars go far in securing a place in the industry for those who win them. Tommy Lee in your hypothetical story would suddenly find himself drenched with offers to score future films, even if his getting that all-important first "big" gig in your scenario was a fluke.

From: Brian Austin <bmaustin@email.unc.edu>

Today's article on the Oscars not meaning anything was perhaps the most mundane article I've ever read on this site. And also the most ironic. If they don't mean anything, why waste the time writing about them? Obviously they must mean something to somebody if you write about them. I must admit that your five year 2000 nominees were midly entertaining. Sadly, probably the highlight of my day.

The following article is we intended to publish as its own FSD, but we're absorbing it into this one. It's an interesting opinion piece about the laws of diminishing returns...

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Hope Those Mouse Ears Are Listening (Why Disney Was Snubbed at the Oscars This Year)

by Christopher Moore

Hercules, albeit fun, was not another Beauty and the Beast as far as Oscar Nominations are concerned. Not to berate Alan Menken's efforts, but it seems almost obvious that Hercules was not an Oscar contender. Disney does not have to rejuvenate their musical approaches nor does Menken have to change his approach with any expedience, but Disney does have to consider what this miss at the Oscars (for Best Comedy or Musical Score--it did receive a Best Song nomination) and the previous miss with The Hunchback of Notre Dame may mean.

The snub comes as no surprise for the following reasons. Disney produces their animated features in thematic cycles, for example: Girl demands more from life (Little Mermaid; Pocahontas), Monster Misunderstood (Beauty and the Beast, The Hunchback of Notre Dame), Young destinies (The Lion King, the upcoming Mulan). For this theory, Hercules was the second spin at Aladdin's themes (Boy becomes hero). If you look at the second turns of each comparison, each only compare to their predecessor. The quality of music still stands up, but the thematic material behind each movie resulting in the music is not as popular as before, and fluctuating in different ways.

Pocahontas was not a complete disaster, but certainly not without a smaller performance at the box office. It is also the least popular of the soundtracks for Disney in recent years. The Hunchback of Notre Dame spelled a return of some success, but the darker themes proved to be too much for the children's demographic. To win nominations in the future, Disney need only remember one thing: THE WELL IS DRYING, and more importantly, the quality is waning.

Disney has follwed patterns and used the same composer one time too many. Even with this, the future projects Disney has up for audiences will prove different musical avenues. With Mulan, Disney offers a rare return of Jerry Goldsmith scoring an animated feature, the last most memorable being The Secret of NIMH. The possibility of this project's results stems from the previous example of using Hans Zimmer for The Lion King, but having Goldsmith on board may provide a refreshing change of sound. Also, having Goldsmith will attract audiences who don't normally follow the Disney scores.

Further into the year, A Bug's Life will favor a return of Randy Newman to Disney's non-traditional animation fare, and possibly a treat somewhat like Toy Story. The difficulty is that Newman is almost being used too often, as well. Having had less projects of late, though, Newman has had time to gear up for new projects, and his style of whimsical fare may lend itself to the movie, whose preview was equally whimsical.

Will either Mulan or A Bug's Life yield Academy Awards, let alone nominations (more than Hercules, at least) and restore Disney to glory. That really doesn't matter. More importantly, the quality will be there, and the music hopefully refreshing. Only time will tell for sure, but when composers such as Goldsmith or (dare I suggest it), Williams score for Disney, interest may yet perk up from audiences--maybe even critics.

Summation: Disney strives for quality and has been ever so critical of it's output. That was before they had a change of supervisors when Jeffrey Katzenberg left to run assist the construction of DreamWorks. It's time to be critical again--especially when DreamWorks (the upcoming Zimmer handled Prince of Egypt) and Fox (the upcoming Planet Ice) both have unusual and different fare that can boast an entertainment to match what Disney has tried to remain faithful to offer.

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Send your comments about any of this stuff to: MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com.

Finally, do you want to... like... do math? Here are some responses to Eldridge's aforementioned column talking about voting procedures and statistics... and stuff:

From: henry@coombs.anu.edu.au (Henry Fitzgerald)

You propose a system of preferential voting, in which the voters express their preferences (1-5) and it's not just the first preference that's taken into account. But I must say that the particular system of preferential voting you recommend is not a very good one. Its defects will become apparent as I describe its rival ...

The Australian Electoral System!

It works as follows. Everyone numbers their ballots 1-5, like this:

4 Barry; 2 Bernstein; 3 Goldsmith; 5 Lee; 1 Williams

Then the votes are sorted into piles, by first preference. My vote would go into the "Williams" pile. If any candidate gets a majority - half or more - of the votes, then that candidate wins, automatically. Usually this doesn't happen, though. In your example, the first-preference piles look like this:

Barry - 19 votes; Bernstein - 20 votes; Goldsmith - 20 votes; Lee - 21 votes; Williams - 20 votes

What happens next may look odd, but there is a reason for it. Barry is the candidate with the least first preference votes: he is then removed from the running, and the preferences on his ballot, and his alone, are counted. (Again, this looks odd, but there is a reason.) What happens is this. We take the votes in the "Barry" pile, and look at their *second* preferences. If a ballot has "Williams" as a second preference, then that ballot is thrown into the Williams pile, as if it were a first preference for Williams. After we distribute Barry's preferences, the tally looks like this:

Bernstein - 24 votes; Goldsmith - 29 votes; Lee - 21 votes; Williams - 26 votes

This means that of the Barry votes, 9 had Goldsmith in second place, 6 had Williams, 4 had Bernstein, and none had Lee. Still nobody has a majority, so we have to keep going. Lee now has the lowest tally, so he is removed from the running, and his preferences are distributed. (Some of Lee's voters' second preferences will be for Barry; if that happens, the third preference will be counted instead.) After distributing Lee's preferences, the tally looks like this:

Bernstein - 31 votes; Goldsmith - 36 votes; Williams - 33 votes

Still no majority. So we remove Bernstein, and, as it happens, most of the people who voted for Bernstein prefer Goldsmith to Williams:

Goldsmith - 54 votes; Williams - 46 votes

So Goldsmith wins.

You'll notice that my preferences as a Williams voter were not counted, and you may think this means that I have been unfairly treated. But I haven't been. As it turned out the contest was between Goldsmith and Williams; and my preference for Williams over Goldsmith had already been noted. Even if I had looked at everyone else's vote before I had cast mine, I would have had no reason to change it in any way.

[additional examples deleted for space, but they make sense]

I, and many other voters, will vote only for candidates in any contest who look likely to win. (This is also a problem with the current first-past-the-post system, of course.) Under the Australian system, however, no person has any reason to lie about their preferences. Even if the contest looks to be one between Goldsmith and Barry, I have no reason not to award Williams my first preference if that's the way I feel about it. The Australian system is thus - in this respect - incorruptible.

From: "Mark R. Kelly" <mark.r.kelly@boeing.com>

While the gist of Monday's column about 'Oscar math' is perfectly valid, it overlooks an essential point -- that the flaws inherent in this kind of voting process apply to many other contests, including the way we (in the US) vote for president. If there are six or eight candidates for a primary election, or for president on the national ballot, the winner is determined by a simple majority vote, exactly the same method Jeff Eldridge claims make the Oscar results "ridiculous". (I'm not disputing the "ridiculous" part, just the implication that the Oscars are especially ridiculous.)

There are of course other voting methods. There's an entire academic field devoted to the subject, and a recent popular book about mathematics, K. C. Cole's "The Universe and the Teacup", devotes a chapter to the subject. There are ranked voting systems, as Eldridge describes; there are approval systems, in which each voter approves or disapproves of each candidate, instead of just picking one; and so on. One interesting academic result is that it can proven mathematically that no system is perfect -- that you can always invent a scenario in which actual voting preferences lead to results that satisfy only a minority of the voters, similar to the Oscar 2000 example of Eldridge's. Cole's book gives an example of a family deciding what movie to see, using a ranked voting system. Another academic result is that, while no one agrees which voting system is best, everyone agrees that simple-majority voting is worst.

One complex method I've seen that seems better than most is used for the Hugo awards for science fiction. There are five items per category, typically, and each voter ranks them in order of preference. When the votes are tallied, only first place votes are counted at first. If one item wins a majority, tallying stops. Otherwise all of the ballots that ranked a different item first are re-tallied, counting their second place votes. And so on, until an item achieves a majority (or a tie is reached). With this system it's quite possible for an item that did not receive the most first place votes to emerge as the eventual winner. (For example, if first-place voting was sharply polarized between two candidates, but everyone agreed on which item they liked next.)

One further comment: as if in implicit acknowledgement of the absurdity of determing what is "best" by popular vote, the awards shows I've seen in the past few years avoid the word. They say for example "And the Oscar goes to". Jeff Eldridge might keep this in mind, and realize that psychologically no kind of group distinction will ever work, in Hollywood or anywhere else. Awards are always about picking one thing out of a group to honor. All an Oscar means is "this is what the Academy has decided to give an Oscar too".

It's just a show.