14 DAY TRIAL // This doesn't happen very often. One of the songs that has been nominated for this year's Oscars Awards was abruptly pulled from the race when it was discovered that Bruce Broughton, a former governor and current music branch executive committee member, tampered with the voting process by emailing several hundred people to let them know his song had been nominated.
In the eyes of the Academy's board of governors that met on Tuesday, this was a clear breach of the voting process.
They say that Bruce used his influence as a former governor and “had emailed [some of the other 239] members of the branch to make them aware of his submission during the nominations voting period,” a statement from the Academy said quoted by Hollywood Reporter.
The song “Alone Yet Not Alone” is a little known tune from a not so notorious film with the same name. It will now be stricken from the ballots without having a replacement named.
Broughton has commented on the issue, “I'm devastated. I indulged in the simplest grassroots campaign and it went against me when the song started getting attention. I got taken down by competition that had months of promotion and advertising behind them. I simply asked people to find the song and consider it.”
The people from the Academy still think this creates an unfair advantage over the other nominees and thus it decided to remove the song from the race.
Throughout the history of the Oscars, this has happened before, though not as often as you might think. Among the productions that were pulled from the race were the 1931 “Stout Hearts and Willing Hands,” the 1942 film “Dive Bomb,” the script for 1953 film “Hondo” and, more recently, the score for “The Godfather” (1972).
Now, it looks as though several people in the industry are frustrated that the empty slot will not be filled by another nominee, considering that in all the previous cases mentioned above, a suitable substitute was always presented account for the removal. The Academy works in mysterious ways.