Fans of the amazing Antonio Sanchez’s drum-heavy score for Alejandro G. Innaritu's widely acclaimed film Birdman will be disappointed to hear that it is has been deemed ineligible for an Academy Award this season.
The branch disqualified the movie for best score because its soundtrack includes pieces of classical music in addition to Sanchez’s score. But this decision has not come without controversy. There is a highly contentious debate about whether or not to overturn the decision between Sanchez, Inarritu, Fox Music and the chairman of the academy's music branch executive committee, the details of which have not been previously reported.
When the Golden Globe nominations were announced, Birdman topped the list with seven nominations, including one for best original score. Later that day, Dave Hanson, the Academy Awards's manager, passed along a note from Charles Fox, chairman of the academy's music branch executive committee, to Sanchez through his manager, notifying the composer that his score was ineligible and would not appear on the academy's long list for the best original score Oscar consideration.
Fox wrote, "The [music branch] committee viewed the film, reviewed the cue sheets and discussed the score at length, particularly with regard to Rule 15, Section II-E of our Awards Rules, which state, 'Scores diluted by the use of tracked themes or other preexisting music, diminished in impact by the predominant use of songs or assembled from the music of more than one composer shall not be eligible.’”
Many believed that Sanchez was a strong contender to become the first Mexican composer to win an Oscar. He has decided, in consultation with Inarritu and Ray Costa of Costa Communications, who is serving as his awards consultant, to formally appeal the decision.
There seems to be a fairly popular thought that the music branch, comprised of 244 members, many of whom are quite elderly and some of whom have not written a note of music in decades, is a bit narrow-minded, perhaps a tad out of touch and does not always adjudicate disputes in a consistent manner.
But Sanchez and Inarritu refuse to go down without a fight, with Inarritu calling the score the film's "spine and the element [that] helped me find the intensity of the characters, the tone and the internal rhythm of each scene."
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