Peter Gabriel Drops Out of Oscar Performance in Protest of Medley Format
There seems to be a lot of controversy surrounding a rather unlikely category for this year’s upcoming Academy Award ceremony: the Best Original Song category. Back when this year’s nominees were first announced, a lot of people were shocked to find that not only had the Academy limited it to 3 nominees instead of the usual 5, but for some reason, Bruce Springsteen’s “The Wrestler” was not among them. Instead, we were given two A.R. Rahman songs from Slumdog Millionaire, and Peter Gabriel’s “Down to Earth” from Wall-E.
Regardless, I was still looking forward to seeing live performances of both of the Rahman songs at the Oscar ceremony, especially “Jai Ho”, the song and dance number set to the end credits of the film. Now it looks like that’s about all we’re going to get, because Peter Gabriel has pulled out as one of the Oscar performers at the last minute. It seems that one the new changes being implemented this year in order to streamline the ceremony is that all of the nominees for Best Original Song will be combined into a single medley, with about 60 seconds dedicated to each song. Gabriel didn’t agree with the choice: “I think it’s a bit unfortunate because while songwriting is a small part of the filmmaking process, we still work bloody hard and deserve a place in the ceremony as well.”
It does seem like a bit of a slap in the face, especially after they cut down the number of nominees this year, however, the song performances do tend to drag on and probably don’t interest the vast majority of viewers. What do you think, did the producers make a good decision here? Is Gabriel justified in dropping out?
Comments (11)
I think it’s a pretty solid move for the producers to pull off. A medley is a good way to cut time in a category that is rather uninteresting to begin with.
Posted by Kasper F. Nielsen on February 15th, 2009I’m just glad they didn’t decide to do this last year, when Once was nominated, because Glen and Marketa’s performance and win was the only good part of that show. Just about any other year I can think of, I couldn’t care less about the best song category.
Posted by Ashley on February 15th, 2009I just can’t wait to see what useless non-movie-related performance piece or movie-related montage they replace this with. The performances of the best songs should be an obvious detour from the awards being handed out, but they seem to want to shaft them for something irrelevant.
Posted by Glendon on February 15th, 2009Oh, bravo. So this medley is definitely going to ensure that the show’s over by 11, right?
Either way, I really love the song so I guess I’ll have to continue play it on iTunes or whatever if I want to hear it. Hrmph.
Posted by Falsk on February 16th, 2009Stupid move on the producers part, I always kind of dig the Original song performances, especially when there’s a nominated song that I really like (Jai Ho, Falling Slowly, It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp, Shaft). Of all the things that make the ceremony drag on the musical numbers are probably the least egregious and they can lead to some really fun moments.
If they really want to make them less of a big deal they should just stop doing these elaborate set pieces and just have the people perform. If they’re going to reduced the songs to just 60 seconds they should just cut them all together.
I have a very bad feeling about the whole ceremony now and I’m glad Peter Gabriel called bullshit, good for him.
Posted by TheMovieVampire on February 16th, 2009eh, he’s just being a baby. no one gives two shits about the stupid music they played at the end of the movie. bet pixar is kicking itself for not getting phil collins to do the wall-e theme song—now there’s a true professional.
Posted by Joel on February 16th, 2009I don’t even remember the song from Wall-E so I can’t say I’m terribly broken up about it. They might as well just ditch the performances all together and show clips of the films set to the songs if all they want is 60 seconds for each.
(Does this mean the other songs now get bumped to 90 seconds each?)
Posted by Liz on February 16th, 2009They might be doing this because they don’t want ten minutes worth of Hindi-language music and they don’t want to give those two songs inequel treatment.
Posted by TheMovieVampire on February 16th, 2009Remember the year the Ramones sang all of the nominated songs as a medley? That worked okay, but not great. Or was that the MTV movie awards? I just remember it happening, and being syked that the Ramones were getting major attention for a moment.
Posted by Deven Science on February 16th, 2009When watching the show… the music performances are the only good thing about it. You people love movies but don’t appreciate how important the music is to it? Disgust.
Posted by Zach on February 21st, 2009Zach, I wouldn’t call “songs” being important to films. I would say the soundtrack or film music is. They should ditch the songs for full orchestral (or whatever) soundtrack selections.
Posted by Reed Farrington on February 23rd, 2009Leave a Reply