A Golden Globe nominated Taylor Swift song and a folk inspired piece from "Inside Llewyn Davis" were snubbed by this year's Oscar nomination for Best Original Song. But discussion about this pales when compared to howls of righteous Christian indignation over how a song, from an evangelical Christian movie, got an Oscar snub. The reason for doing so is clear. The songwriter e-mailed the song to members of the Academy and this was seen as an attempt to gain "unfair advantage." But in the world of Fox News, Christians are allowed to break the rules and those who call them out on it are part of Satan's minions. On yesterday's Fox & Friends, two of Fox's professional Christians Peter Johnson Jr. and Elisabeth Hasselbeck advanced the outrage in yet another patented persecuted Christian pity party. The patented evil Hollywood "picks on" godly Christians Fox narrative was advanced, later in the day, by "truth detector" Megyn Kelly who cited the Fox "brain room" to advance the agitprop.
In keeping with Kelly's standard propaganda paradigm, Kelly immediately set the message with the right code words while framing the propaganda. Her eyes flashing, her voice loud and dramatic began: "A dramatic backlash after the Academy Awards said no to a Christian movie." The chyron was the same used on Fox & Friends: "Fight for Faith..." She reported that the film had been nominated for an award but it was "abruptly rescinded." introduced her guest, Hollywood producer and anti-Obama ideologue, Gerald Molen who, according to Kelly, thinks that "this smacks of anti-Christian bigotry." In citing his films she only mentioned "Schindler's List" and the upcoming "America." She didn't mention that he also produced Dinesh D'Souza's anti-Obama film, "2016, Obama's America."
Kelly quoted from Molen's letter to the Academy in protest of the decision. Molen, who is also outraged about the Justice Department's indictment, for campaign finance violations, of D'Souza, claimed that despite the Academy's contention that this is lobbying, lobbying is standard practice for Oscar nominees. Kelly cited the Fox "Brain Room" which claimed that this happens "all the time," that it is "common practice to lobby" and "it doesn't look like any rules were broken." (So that proves it folks!) To Kelly's question, Molen didn't know of any instances of nominations being rescinded for this reason. Kelly said that the Brain Room's number came up with four.
Kelly, in her own words, summed up the innocent message of the songwriter who was met, by the Academy, with "this is a no, no." Kelly wanted to know why sending out e-mails was "so taboo." Molen tried to equate the e-mails with other means of publicizing films. He then spoke about the singers and musicians who will be affected. Kelly, looking oh, so coy, mentioned that Molen had found out that a rival studio, upset about not having been nominated, hired an investigator to "dig up dirt" on the Christian film which was then "bounced" by the Academy. Molen hoped that the Academy would reconsider. Kelly's last comment was about how the singer, who has nothing to do with the awards process, is an inspiring Christian quadriplegic.
Obviously, the brains in the Fox Brain Room are either dead or on an extended lunch break because the songwriter is in violation of Rule 5.3 which relates to campaigning for the Oscars. If DVD's are sent to Academy members, credits of composer and lyricist must be removed from the eligible songs. Bruce Broughton's e-mails requested that the judges "boldly direct [their] attention" to the nominated song which, according to one critic, is "a dreary dirge of a hymn that sounds like it should be played in the midst of a sleepy Sunday morning mass."
But even if the song does get reinstated, it's still going to lose to U2's "Ordinary Love."
About the attempt to bully the guild to let in two entries that disqualified themselves, and (IMHO) aren’t even good enough to be nominated if they didn’t, based on the religion of the person who performed it? That’s something everyone should care about, no matter the venue, because every time they succeed on that, it emboldens them to go further putting their race/religion’s rights over the rights of others.
And I ain’t standing for that.
That’s what Swift has going against her, if she didn’t campaign. And if she was nominated, the smart money’s on “Ordinary Love” and “Let it Go,” seeing as how those were not only the best songs on their own merit, but were employed to brilliant, show stopping effect.
But I guess we have to start nominating based on the religion of the performer, according to Fox News…
The fact that it was nominated for a Golden Globe doesn’t really say much. The Golden Globes criteria is different from the Oscars (an example—Emmylou Harris’s beautiful song “A Love That Will Never Grow Old” from “Brokeback Mountain” was not only nominated but WON the Golden Globe but wasn’t even nominated for the Academy Awards because it didn’t get enough play time IN the movie; in the film, it only plays about 30 seconds in a scene where Jake Gyllenhaal is driving his truck). And since 2000’s Golden Globes, there’ve only been 4 songs that won the Golden Globe AND won the Oscar and only 3 other songs (including U2’s “Ordinary Love”) have even been nominated for the Oscar. OTOH, the other 7 Golden Globe winners didn’t even earn an Oscar nod (and, with the “exception” of Harris’s performance, the performers of those other Golden Globe winning songs were all by music superstars—Springsteen, Prince, Madonna, Cher, Mick Jagger, Eddie Vedder—aside from Cher’s song which was written by Diane Warren, the performers of those winning songs either wrote or co-wrote the songs).
For the record, here’s a link to the Oscar qualifications for Best Original Song, http://www.oscars.org/awards/academyawards/rules/86/rule15.html and according to Section 2, paragraph E, dealing with songwriting credits, there’s a list of exclusions; the second line excludes “partial contributors,” defined as “any writer not responsible for the overall design of the work” and one of the songwriter credits for “Please Mr Kennedy” is George Cromarty, a man who died in 1992 (unless someone can prove they held a successful seance and got Mr Cromarty’s active participation, I’d say that’s a pretty good reason for the song to be excluded).
