Why Carly Rae Jepsens Cut to the

Feeling Proves the Oscars Need to

Rewrite their Rules
The fact that "Cut to the Feeling" isn't eligible for Best Original Song is an
unforgivable injustice.

David Ehrlich
15 mins ago
@davidehrlich

Manuel Nauta/REX/Shutterstock

Carly Rae Jepsens Cut to the Feeling may be the song of this never-ending
summer, but audiences in France and the UK have been grooving to this irresistible
pop masterpiece since last December (about six months before it was available for
digital download). Recorded during the creation of Jepsens monumental
EMOTION LP, Cut to the Feeling was deemed too cinematic for inclusion on
the record, and set aside for future use. For mere mortals, this euphoric jam would
have been a career-defining milestone; for Jepsen, it was merely a B-side.
Fortunately, it wouldnt be long before the song found a home, as its singer one
of post-Gretzky Canadas finest cultural exports offered it to a Montreal animation
studio when she agreed to voice one of the characters in their animated feature,
Ballerina.

Retitled Leap! for its impending U.S. release, the harmlessly inspirational kids
movie tells the story of a little girl named Flicie who runs away to Paris (circa 1880)
in order to fulfill her dream of becoming a dancer. Jepsen plays the injured and
traumatized former ballet star who agrees to shelter the heroine. When Flicie twirls
and plies to Cut to the Feeling during the climactic performance, the moment is
almost as sweet and ecstatic as it is glaringly anachronistic. No disrespect to
Leap! directors ric Summer and ric Warin, but Cut to the Feeling is doing most
of the heavy lifting, here; used correctly, that song could have made The Emoji
Movie feel like a like-affirming modern classic.
We all know what happens next: Carly Rae Jepsen gets nominated for (and probably
wins) Best Original Song at the 90th Academy Awards next March, her spirited
performance providing the Oscar telecast with a rare moment of real life.
Theres just one problem: Cut to the Feeling isnt even eligible.
The Academy wont even allow for the possibility that the show might include three
minutes of actual fun amidst three-and-a-half hours of limp showbiz auto-fellatio;
God forbid the ratings actually go up for once. Heres how distributor The Weinstein
Company explained the songs disqualification when reached for comment: Cut to
the Feeling was not written specifically for Leap!, so it is not eligible for an
Academy Award for Best Original Song.
Of course, the Carly Rae Jepsen Debacle of 2017 isnt a new phenomenon, its just a
particularly glaring example of a problem thats been sucking the fun out of
the Oscars for a long time. Its also further proof that the Best Original Song
category is the shows most easily preventable disaster. Remember when Alone Yet
Not Alone was stripped of its nomination because it was revealed that its
songwriter cold-called people to campaign? Remember when voters were falsely
convinced that Lana del Reys Young and Beautiful wasnt eligible for
consideration, a deceit that was only possible because the categorys rules have
become too asinine to track? Woof.
The Oscars are always looking for new ways to stay relevant and inspire people to
watch the show. Unfortunately, the Oscars are always finding new ways to do the
exact opposite. Whenever the show manages to stumble towards the zeitgeist as
it did last February when La La Land was mistakenly declared Best Picture it
tends to do so by accident. Whenever it whiffs on live TV in front of a massive global
audience, it tends to do so by shooting itself in the foot (the greatest trick the devil
ever pulled was convincing these people to waste minutes of priceless airtime
on footage of celebrities receiving free pizza). The Academy loves to get in its own
way. By this point, self-sabotage is practically a time-honored tradition, as much a
staple of the annual telecast as a befuddled reaction shot of Meryl Streep, or
someone youve never heard of winning for a short film about orphans coming of
age during the Holocaust.
Read More:Weinstein Co. Moves Mary Magdalene Back to Easter and Now Has
Just One Oscar Contender
Nowhere is this phenomenon more pronounced than in the Best Original Song
category. The Oscars are largely the same every year: The same glitz, the same
glamor, the same smattering of snubs and surprises. But the Best Original Song
category is a beast of a different nature. This is the magical part of the show where
Robin Williams can sing about how Canada is to blame for all our problems, where
Three 6 Mafia can rap about pimping in front of the whitest audience in the world,
where Elliott Smith can sit on stage and break your heart, and where Common and
John Legend can fill it back up again. Its the Academys best chance to engineer a
viral moment, to engage people who otherwise couldnt care less about movie stars
giving each other trophies for being movie stars.

So what do they do? Everything they can to minimize the possibility of a moment
like that actually happening. Yes, the Oscars have lucked into television gold from
time to time, but a series of arcane rules are the only thing that prevent them from
doing so multiple times each year. Jerome Kern, who won the award for Best Original
Song back in 1941, was fighting the good fight when he pushed the Academy to
stipulate that songs have to be written specifically for the films in which theyre
heard in order to be eligible, but the Academy has never met a good rule it couldnt
turn into an asinine headache (as the submission process for Best Foreign Language
Film loves to remind us).
These days, a song is disqualified if it remixes or samples any pre-existing work
(sorry, Coolio). A song can be saved for the end credits, but its disqualified if its not
the first song played in the end credits (sorry, Madonna). A song can appear on
other recordings prior to the release of the film for which it was written, but the
song has to have been written explicitly for that film, so its disqualified if the artist
went into the studio with hazy or ulterior motives. This last point henceforth
known as the Carly Rae Jepsen rule is by far the dumbest and most arbitrary of
them all, and while it made plenty of sense in 1941, it feels antiquated in a digital
world where the creation of music is no longer so inextricably tethered to the
corporate interests who fund it.
Of course, the emphasis on intent has always been fundamentally antithetical to
how people consume and internalize art. The Academys principle is meant to
privilege a holistic approach to filmmaking, but the reality of the situation is that
movies almost always have to collate an unquantifiable degree of pre-existing
material in order to exist. The Empire State Building wasnt built so that King Kong
could grip its spire, but the beauty of that sequence is in how it briefly convinces
you otherwise. Thats not to say there should be an Oscar for Best Architecture
(although you could argue that Best Production Design comes close), rather just to
stress how cinema is an art that often finds purpose in repurposing. Why should we
emphasize the circumstances by which a thing was conceived if its used in a way
that makes you feel as though youre seeing or hearing it for the first time? The
music world doesnt even take such a hardline approach with their own content. The
Grammys didnt hesitate to crown Radioheads Kid A the Best Alternative Album
of 2000 even though its soaring final track was written for a different LP more than
half a decade prior.
Of course, the bigger point of contention here is that Cut to the Feeling would
exist without Leap! (even though Leap! may not have existed without Cut to
the Feeling, at least not in its current incarnation). Thats admittedly a tough hurdle
to clear. But the fact of the matter is that Jepsen who probably didnt have Oscars
on her mind when she agreed to lend her talents to a low-budget cartoon about a
19th Century ballerina chose the movie as the avenue by which Cut to the
Feeling would make its way out into the world. For six months, an eternity in the
world of digital music, you had to buy a ticket to Leap! if you wanted to hear
Jepsens banging new anthem. It wasnt even on the soundtrack.

And its not like Cut to the Feeling is used as window-dressing in the film; unlike
the volumes of instantly forgettable songs that studios commission every year in
order to goose their nomination counts (not even Bono remembers the ballad he
wrote for Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom), Jepsens jam is relied upon to provide
Leap! with its emotional climax. Of course, individual Academy Awards are meant
to honor individual achievements, no matter how much they actually help the films
that inspired them (some makeup artists won an Oscar for Suicide Squad, after
all). But when the mental gymnastics required to disqualify a song are as
exhausting as those necessary to argue for its eligibility, theres no reason why the
tie shouldnt go to the runner.

Streamlining this category is the only way to save it from selling itself short. Its only
a matter of time before Carly Rae Jepsen is actually nominated for an Oscar, but the
truth is that the Oscars need her a lot more than she needs them. With any luck,
hers will be the semantic non-scandal that makes the Academy reconsider how they
operate. It goes without saying that AMPAS has bigger fish to fry, but few of their
problems would be easier to solve. The answers are right there in Jepsens lyrics:
Cancel your reservations, no more hesitations, this is on
I cant make it stop, give me all you got
I want it all or nothing, no more in between, now give your
Everything to me, lets get real baby
A chemical reaction, take me in your arms and make me oh.