Scores for ‘Tarzan,’ ‘South Park’ Can’t Win

Two of the year’s most successful animated movies--and the year’s only musicals--won’t be eligible for Oscars for their scores, a move that has some producers and composers crying foul.

The scores for Disney’s “Tarzan” and Paramount’s “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut” have been forced out of competition, the result of a streamlining of music categories from three back to two (best song and original dramatic score). Both films continue to be eligible in the best song category.

It’s the latest brouhaha to plague the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ music branch, often the target of complaints at Oscar time over its eligibility rules.

Academy executive director Bruce Davis confirmed the decision, noting that “Tarzan” and “South Park” were the only films submitted for consideration in the optional third category of original musical or comedy score.

The rules state that if four or fewer films are submitted for a category, the branch’s executive committee can recommend that no award be given. With no comedy or musical score category available to them, composers Mark Mancina (“Tarzan”) and Marc Shaiman (“South Park”) had hoped to submit their underscores--that is, all the music other than the songs--for consideration in the dramatic score category.

In Mancina’s case, it’s approximately 45 minutes of original music unrelated to Phil Collins’ songs for “Tarzan.” For Shaiman, it’s approximately 35 minutes of music, partly original and partly adapted from the songs by Shaiman and “South Park” co-creator Trey Parker.

But the music branch ruled that they may not resubmit in the dramatic score category, citing a provision that restricts music from musicals to the musical or comedy score group--which, this year, doesn’t exist.

“I’m still in disbelief that a dramatic score for an animated movie like ‘Tarzan’ cannot be reentered,” said Mancina, who has written scores for such films as “Speed” and “Twister” but has never been nominated. “I understand the difficulty that there is in the categorization of scores. . . . But writing a score like ‘Tarzan’ is no different than writing a score for any other movie that needs emotion, charm, fun, humor and all of the characteristics that a score brings to a movie.”

Shaiman, a four-time nominee (for “The American President,” “Sleepless in Seattle” and others), said he was “shocked and disappointed.” “South Park” executive producer Scott Rudin called the decision “outrageous” and “incredibly unfair. It doesn’t make sense to me. This movie has a huge, complicated, ambitious dramatic score, which is a big part of the reason the movie works.”

Rudin said he had written a “long, impassioned letter” to the academy asking for reconsideration, but he acknowledged that there is no formal appeals process and that any change in the decision was a longshot. Academy sources said Friday that, because the rules clearly make the two scores ineligible outside the musical and comedy score category, the music branch is unlikely to reconsider.

“In any awards process, there are always complaints,” said composer Charles Bernstein, one of three governors of the academy’s music branch. “There simply are not categories for every single achievement.”

According to Davis, the academy has traditionally been wary of offering awards “in categories where there’s not enough of a field available to make a legitimate competition.

“The issues in the music area are inherently complicated,” Davis added. “The branch executive committee has been tinkering with (the rules) for years to try to make them as fair as possible, but I don’t think anyone, anymore, thinks that ‘as fair as possible’ is going to mean making everybody happy.”

Privately, music branch members say the current status of the music categories is, in part, a reaction to Alan Menken’s three wins for original score (for the Disney animated films “The Little Mermaid,” “Beauty and the Beast” and “Aladdin,” between 1989 and 1992).

Voters were choosing the songs, not really voting for Menken’s dramatic underscore, many believe. “The problem here is one of potential confusion to voters,” Davis acknowledges. “With a musical film, it’s hard to ask people to set aside the term ‘score’ in a Broadway sense and to focus on the score in a movie sense. There’s a tendency to honor the songs even though it’s not a song category.”

Another issue is the fact that the academy ballot lists only film titles, not composer names, under the score category and many voters were in the habit of checking off whatever that year’s big musical happened to be.

The result was the 1995 creation of the musical or comedy score category, enabling serious dramatic scores to compete against each other without having to fight song scores too. And, by adding comedy scores to the mix, original musicals had a spot even in years that only saw a few (like this year). Menken, in fact, with lyricist Stephen Schwartz, won that first year for “Pocahontas.”