Academy Award For Best Original Song - Rules and Number of Nominations

Rules and Number of Nominations

Until the Academy Awards for 1944 (awarded in 1945) any number of songs could be nominated for the award. For the 1944 awards, 14 songs were nominated. Since then only five are nominated each year, except for 2011 when only two were nominated; 1988, 2005, and 2008, when only three were nominated; and 2010 when only 4 were nominated.

While most Oscar categories have a fixed minimum and/or maximum number of nominations (such as the Best Original Score, which always has five nominations), the Best Original Song category can have multiple nominations And prior to the 85th Academy Awards the number of nominations varied from two to five. This was due to the rules set by the Academy. The rules stipulated that each member of the Music Branch of the Academy was asked to vote for their favorite songs, using a special points system using 10, 9.5, 9, 8.5, 8, 7.5, 7, 6.5 or 6 points. Only those songs that received an average score of 8.25 or more were eligible for nomination. If no song received an average of 8.25 or more, there would be no nominees. And if only one song achieved that score, it and the song receiving the next highest score would be the two nominees (this was the case in the 2011 Oscars, awarded in 2012).

Following the two song competition in 2011, however, a rule change was made by the committee. Instead of the math system that was set in place the number of nominations is now contingent upon the number of submissions. Depending on the amount received by the Academy there would be a minimum of five, three or none for any given year. The number of submissions for the award in 2011 doubled the necessary minimum for five indicating it unlikely that the category would have fewer than five nominees in the future.

Not every song used in a film is eligible for this category. According to Academy rules, a song should be "original and specifically written for a motion picture. There must be a clearly audible, intelligible, substantive rendition (not necessarily visually presented) of both lyrics and melody, used in the body of the motion picture or as the first music cue in the end credits."

Though this is one of the few Oscar categories where one film can receive multiple nominations, the first to do so was Fame in 1980. Only four films have featured three nominated songs: Beauty and the Beast, The Lion King, Dreamgirls, and Enchanted. Dreamgirls and Enchanted lost on every nomination: An Inconvenient Truth original song "I Need to Wake Up" defeated all three of the nominated songs from Dreamgirls, while "Falling Slowly" from Once defeated all three of Enchanted's nominations. After these two consecutive defeats, a new rule was instated in June 2008 that a film could have no more than two songs nominated in the Best Original Song category in one year.