Academy Award Fraud
 

Revoke Gustavo Santaolalla's Oscar for Best Orginal Score!!!

As I've alleged before in these very pages, dear readers, Gustavo's score for Babel was not entirely original! In fact, one vital music queue - - underscoring such an important plot point that it was used as overscore (all other sound muted) - - was lifted directly from his score for an episode of Deadwood three years earlier.


I didn't want to make a big deal of it before .... but now the charletan has won an Oscar for his self-plagerism -- and action must be taken! Now I have the proof, ladies and gentlemen ... and I present Exhibit A and B for your perusal.


First up, a 2003 cue from the HBO original series Deadwood, heard after the dastardly murder of Wild Bill Hickock by the Coward McCall.

Then, Santaolallo's cue from the 2006 film Babel, for which he won the Oscar under false pretenses. Cate Blanchette is finally med-evacutated by helicopter from a poor Moroccon village after being accidentally shot by two boys. The scene is so vital that, till the last part of the cue, all sound effects of the helicopter and rescue efforts were muted ... so the recycled music could be heard above the din ... the better to fool unsuspecting Academy voters.


The cues are identical. In fact, the later-used cue is about a minute longer than the earlier one ... leading me to suspect that both instances may have been recycled by an even earlier composition by Mr. Santaolallo! Oh, the shame!


If, after listening*, you are convinced that a great injustice has been done, write to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to express your outrage.




* with apologies for any inconvenience, simply enter the 3-letter anti-spambot code, click the Download button, wait for the countdown, and click Download again.


It's a sad, sad day for the Academy, dear friends. :(

Isn't it common practice for composers to recycle their scores?

In fact, one of the cues on the Babel soundtrack also appears on The Insider soundtrack - the name isn't even changed.

I agree that it's BS, but it's hardly a surprise.

Are the rules for score qualification posted anywhere?

Never mind, found the rules myself.

This guy says part of the score was also reused from his Oscar-winning score last year for Brokeback Mountain.

bolding is not mine

Eh, all of Phillip Glass' music sounds the same and he keeps getting nominated.


(joke!) I love Glass, but I hear that comment way to often.

And Randy Newman's. If it gets to the point that even I can recognize who scored a movie then you know they're deep in a rut.

John Williams is another one.

(I hope GD isn't listening)

Danny Elfman

For his orchestral work, I could definitely see people saying that, but for his more keyboard/small ensemble type work (Midnight Run, Wisdom, some of the TV work), it's quite a bit harder to say that...

I'm with you on Elfman, too.

I thought he deserved two Oscars for Brokeback alone. Haunting, unforgettable...
:)

Sounding the same is not the issue. Lots of composers' works end up sounding similar because that's their style. This was a piece of actual recycled work ... and if I read the rules correctly, ineligible for an Academy Award nomination.


Shenanigans!







Oh, and - of course - - bah!

Really? I'll be damned if I can remember that score and I saw it well after the theatrical run

Meh, I swallowed that pill long ago. He's gone the way of Burton in terms of his scoring. Such is life.

But I agree with iSm that there's a difference between John Williams reusing some 3-note sequence at the end of a some refrain in a new score vs. a copy and paste of the whole melody.

But, the key rule is 5-d and the definition of "diluted". Is using it once, but during a pivotal moment, enough to brand whole score, beginning to end, as "diluted"?

I'm not surprised. It was all over the TV: the ads, the parodies, the clips for awards shows... But since you don't watch TV... :)
And, of course, there's the Tony Moran remixed club version. I have that one. It makes me laugh.
:D

I wonder what would happen if someone did get stripped of an Academy Award?

Would there be like this big press conference like Milli Vanilli had when they gave up their Grammy 17 years ago? :D

TeeHee - let's find out!

I loved Eflman scores from Pee Wee's Big Adventure up through Batman. Then he lost me, which is sad, I thought some of his work was just great. He lifted up the Burton films (which always seem to crap out and lose focus and steam about 2/3 way through them)

I'm a big Howard Shore fan and don't get me started on the old classic film composers, gosh but some of the scores are just great.

I've not seen Babel yet and as for Brokeback, all I can remember is the basic theme and that is from it being drilled into my head from watching all the trailer parodies last year :)

But, if the rules are such as iSm spells out, then I agree the award is not deserved. So I guess you blame the nominating committee?

Korngold, Steiner, Tiomkin, Hermann, Rozsa and Waxman all had a unique (to them) style and sound. But I can remember almost none of them borrowing or using themes from an earlier score.

Is this online somewhere?

Well, if one cue is from Deadwood and another (as per mousepod) from The Insider, I'd say Santaolallo's score for Babel is sufficiently diluted by his earlier compositions to be disqualified from Oscar competition.

If he had used Happy Birthday instead, would that have been enough to dilute it? That's been used in thousands of different places, but is 2 minutes of re-used music in a 120 minute score enough to disqualify it? If not, what's the dividing line? Obviously changing one note of a score isn't enough to be original and reusing 3 notes isn't enough to be not original. Is the pivotal-ness of the scene a factor or not?

In the end, it's a judgment call on the Academy's part. They obviously felt that one segment of recognizable music did not invalidate the entire 120 minutes as being a original work "as a whole". You obviously disagree and feel that the prominent use of the pre-existing music is enough to taint the whole. I've seen neither Deadwood nor Babel (nor The Insider), so I have no point of reference. But in terms of blatant rule violation, I don't see one as it's a subjective definition.


(ETA: The cue from The Insider is the same one that we're talking about. It's in all three)

That makes it even funnier.

Just one thing, tho. Film scores are not generally 120 minutes long.


And I don't mind if it's a judgment call. I just have my doubts (based on nothing) that any sort of consideration was made of non-original portions of this purported original score.

I guess I'm still peeved, years later, that the lone original song from Moulin Rouge ("Come What May") was disqualified from Oscar consideration merely because it was written for (but did not appear in) a different film.

To my mind, going by the same logic, sneaking two previously composed and media utilized music cues into a score is not fair game. As it turns out, the frelling Babel soundtrack CD has 36 tracks ... so I guess one could say that 10 minutes of recycled music is no real dilution.

I confess to being a little confused by there being 2 CDs and 36 seperate tracks on that soundtrack. Babel didn't strike me as that heavy on the score ... but I'm not willing to subject myself to it again just to find out. Given Mr. Santaolallo's reputation for recycling, I wouldn't be surprised if the Babel CD was really just a greatest hits album.

I've found the CD Single for sale on Amazon and Verve Records' site, but I haven't found a site that lets you listen to it easily without having to download tons of software etc.
I'll get you a copy when we meet each other irl.
:)

Here's the Amazon listing.

And heheheh, I didn't see GD's ETA before I posted. Yes, that makes it funnier ... though in an earlier post, I alluded to evidence that the cue had been used earlier than the two examples I posted.

Sheesh, at this rate, I'm surprised it wasn't in the Brokeback Mountain score. I wonder why not. No wonder €uro didn't find that score memorable. It didn't include the Santaolallo trademark!

Perhaps there's some Academy rule exemption for a music cue that a composer re-uses in 75% of his films.

Oh, wow. I just listened to these tracks. The Deadwood piece in question is actually the only bit of score from Babel that registered with me (and apparently the only one that registered with the professionals, too-- used at the climax, as well as so frequently in the trailers and the awards montages, etc.)

Sure, he's stealing from himself... but Tom points out that if he wrote it for Deadwood, in all likelihood it legally belongs to HBO and not to the composer himself.

Not to mention that, as the blogger Alex linked to suggests, if he stole two minutes of his own Brokeback score, that is 2/13ths of the original music from that movie. 15%. What a hack.

I've decided we should send a CD of the Babel score alternated with its matching Deadwood, Brokeback and Insider pieces to the LA Time "Envelope" reporter and see if we can smoke this out. Three different direct and lengthy lifts, in my opinion, is quite the diluted score.

ETA: the same clip in Insider? This is getting ridiculous.

Just doing a little more research - it seems that James Horner's score for Aliens (nominated in 1986) used cues cut for Star Trek II and III... will verify when I get home. I still think that this is more typical than one might imagine (not that it's an excuse).

...research continues... the Academy withdrew Nino Rota's nomination for the first Godfather movie when they realized he used cues from a previous work of his.

I seem to remember similarities between the "Han and Leia" section of the Empire score and parts of Raiders, too.

Similarities is not the issue. James Horner is the most infamous film composer for using similarities. Titanic has a passage from his Star Trek IV score (as apparently, per mousepod, does Aliens). But repeating a passage is not the same as re-using an entire music cue. Similar sounding scores (such as those by John Williams, who -despite that- does not repeat passages) are even further away from the self-plagerism I am railing about.


Perhaps when I'm feeling less lazy, I'll make an account at that The Envelope board and post the links I have to Deadwood and Babel. Ooooh, does anyone have The Insider score???

I hear that the editor doesn't read the board, unfortunately.

So, oddly enough, that piece of music is chasing me! I turned on KCRW for the first time in awhile (didn't feel like listening to the iPod) at a time of day I'm not usually traveling, and the first full song I hear? That very same theme from Babel. Er, Deadwood. Er, The Insider.