A lot of ink, both on this blog and elsewhere, has been spilled already about the major upheaval of the Best Picture category, but little attention has been paid to the other major change the Academy made last week to their nominating procedure. Starting this year, in the Best Song category, there may be 2, 3, 4 or 5 nominees, or no nominees at all.

The Best Song category has always had a weird voting system where voters watch a DVD of all the songs in the context of their films, and then rank them 1 through 10. The cutoff is now set at 8.25 (which I believe it was in the past), and if no film gets that high of a score there will be no nominees. If there are nominees, they will only be songs that got that high score.

In a year where the Academy is making drastic changes to presumably raise ratings, getting away with the number of production numbers may be harmful to that goal. It seems to me that to a majority of casual viewers, the songs may be a highlight of the show (and can attract some big-name stars to perform). The reason given by the Academy is that the quality of nominees has been low, and this will help raise the bar for nominees. Unfortunately, this may not solve the problem.

Last year saw only 3 nominees, as compared to the usual 5 nominees. Those 3 were two songs from Slumdog Millionaire (“Jai Ho” and “O Sava”) and “Down to Earth” from Wall-E. All the nominees were fine, but none were fantastic songs and looking back on it I don’t think I could hum any of the songs four months later (and Wall-E was my favorite film of the year). With this new voting procedure, either all three would have been nominated, two of them would have been or there would have been no award given. No other song would have had a chance to get in.

This would be a good rule change if we were merely minimizing the damage, but it doesn’t do anything to improve the category. There are many great songs still written for films every year (in fact, the last few years have seen a lot of strong candidates the Academy has completely overlooked), and all the Academy is doing is making it harder for them to get nominated. Last year, there was much attention to Bruce Springsteen’s “The Wrestler,” a popular song by a great rock musician in an Oscar-nominated film that couldn’t get a nomination. These rule changes wouldn’t have helped it a bit. Neither would it have helped two of my other favorite songs of last year, “Rock Me Sexy Jesus” from Hamlet 2 (although humorous songs have never done well in this category) and the glorious “Little Person” from Synechdoche, New York. Neither would it have helped the music of Dan in Real Life or Adrienne Shelley’s “Baby Don’t You Cry” from Waitress the year before, both of which were some of the best use of music in a film in the past few years.

Like the attempt to clean up the Best Documentary category a few years ago, the Academy is solving its problems in the wrong way (although the quality of that category has gone up). This year, I expect 2 or 3 mediocre songs to get nominated, better than 5 mediocre ones, but I would rather have 3 mediocre songs and the chance of one great song to sneak in instead.