Jon Burlingame always does great work sussing out this and that about the Academy's music branch, and he's written up a nice piece this week that dissects many of the issues that rubbed contenders and fans the wrong way this season.  Here's quick look:

Longtime participants in the Oscar game seem even more incensed than usual this year, not so much about the missing-in-action rock 'n' rollers as about the nomination process that eliminated them, especially the bakeoff system for choosing song nominees (now in its third year) that requires branch members to attend a marathon screening of all the entered songs.

An added factor this year -- which has irritated studio execs, marketers and award-season consultants -- is the ban on CD mailings to Acad members. Music-branch executive committee members say they will "revisit" this decision, which suggests it could be overturned.

However, I have to say, I slightly disagreed with Burlingame's assessment of the fate of Jonny Greenwood's "There Will Be Blood" score:

Wall Street Journal pop music critic Jim Fusilli doesn't take issue with Greenwood's disqualification, the result of a close check of the film's musical content, which revealed 35 minutes of new music versus 46 minutes of pre-existing music (by Brahms and Arvo Part, plus two earlier Greenwood compositions). That's a clear violation of Oscar eligibility rules (which ban "scores diluted by the use of tracked themes or other pre-existing music").

What bothers him is what appears to be an inconsistency of application of Acad rules, citing last year's Gustavo Santaolalla win for "Babel" despite the presence of considerable nonoriginal music. "You had all of these songs from other sources that appeared, and yet that didn't seem to prevent the Academy from looking at the score as a whole," he says.

Yes, most of that is true.  A major issue is indeed with the inconsistency of rulings, but the even deeper issue is the subjectivity of the rule that DQ'd Greenwood's work.  The Academy decided, quite subjectively, that the viewer comes away from "Blood" predominantly recalling the unoriginal works.  But who's to say what a viewer predominantly recalls?  It is a backwards system that needs updating and, frankly, should not depend on number of minute versus number of minutes.  A lot of those 46 minutes were songs and such in the public domain that are scattered throughout the pic.

Also, the even bigger issue was the Academy's decision to notify Greenwood and Paramount Vantage at the last...possible...minute, as we reported here last month.

But that's just me.  Take a look at the rest of Burlingame's piece.  It does a nice job of taking AMPAS to task on some rusty red tape.