Lana Del Rey Rejected For Best Song Oscar Nom, Fans Outraged
Lana Del Rey, the neo-torch singer who was formerly a New York indie singer-songwriter under her real name of Lizzie Grant, was on the Motion Picture Academy’s list of potential Oscar nominees for her song “Young and Beautiful.” But when the nominees were announced January 16, Lana Del Rey’s name wasn’t called, as Entertainment Weekly pointed out.
The song, from the soundtrack to last year’s film adaptation of the F. Scott Fitzgerald classic novel The Great Gatsby, has received a staggering 58 million-plus views for its video on YouTube, which can be seen above. But the tune fell short in the Academy’s eyes.
Now the singer’s fans are taking to, where else, Twitter, to voice their displeasure.
Pissed off with the Oscars not giving Lana Del Rey any nominations for young and beautiful in Gatsby
— Grace (@__Gracey_) January 16, 2014
Also–no nomination for Lana Del Rey for Best Original Song, for “Young and Beautiful” from The Great Gatsby? So wrong! #Oscars
— JuliaRyan (@JuliaRyan) January 16, 2014
I’m so pressed that the Oscars snubbed Young and Beautiful by Lana Del Rey for Best Original Song.
— Sue (@suey_xo) January 16, 2014
To cite just a few.
No reaction yet from Del Rey herself. Bizarrely, someone who has yet to come forward targeted Del Rey’s song for exclusion early in the process. According to Rolling Stone, an anonymous person or people mailed official-looking letters to Academy voters falsely stating that the Lana Del Rey song had been ruled ineligible for consideration.
Did the sabotage campaign actually work? At this point, there’s no real way to know. But we do know that Lana Del Rey was not the only unexpected exclusion from the final five now up for the award, to be handed out during the Academy Awards telecast March 2, from the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California.
Taylor Swift, the current 24-year-old queen of country-pop, was also given a cold shoulder by the Academy for her song “Sweeter Than Fiction,” from the film One Chance. Coldplay missed out with their tune “Atlas” from the soundtrack to The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, as did Edie Brickell who had two songs in the running for Oscar nods in the charming summer teen comedy, The Way, Way Back.
The song that The Washington Post said “should have been a shoo-in for best original song,” T-Bone Burnett’s “Please Mr. Kennedy” from the Coen Brothers’ paean to the early 1960s New York City folk music scene, Inside Llewyn Davis, actually was ruled ineligible.
According to the entertainment news site Hitfix, because “Please Mr. Kennedy” contained tongue-in-cheek quotations from actual folk tunes from that era, the Academy ruled it “not original” and nixed it from consideration.
Check out the “Please Mr. Kennedy” clip from Inside Llewyn Davis below. And yes, that is a bearded Justin Timberlake opposite the film’s lead actor, Oscar Isaac.
Why would some anonymous prankster seek to put the kibosh on a Lana Del Rey nomination? We may never know for sure. But it is true that since Lana Del Rey’s sudden explosion on to the pop music scene, her popularity has generated an equally ardent backlash against her.
She is sometimes seen as a phony for her complete image makeover, and there have long been rumors that her wealthy father financed her career. Entrepreneur Rob Grant made millions buying and selling internet domain names.
Somehow, however, we don’t think this will be the last chance at an Oscar nomination for Lana Del Rey. What do you think?
