Flight Of The Conchords' Bret Mckenzie Nominated For Best Original Song Oscar

Bret McKenzie of Flight Of The Conchords has been nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

He penned "Man Or Muppet" which features in "The Muppets". He is up against only one other track in the category, "Real In Rio" from the film "Rio".

The original longlist for the award featured 39 different songs, including Lady Gaga and Elton John's duet "Hello Hello" from "Gnomeo And Juliet", Zooey Deschanel's "So Long" from "Winnie The Pooh" and Robbie Williams and Brad Paisley's duet "Collision Of Worlds" from "Cars 2".

Bret McKenzie was longlisted for two songs from "The Muppets"; "Man Or Muppet" and "Life's A Happy Song", in addition to The National for "Think You Can Wait" from "Win-Win" and Chris Cornell for "The Keeper" from "Machine Gun Preacher".

The National's frontman Matt Berninger recently spoke out about the band's inclusion on the longlist saying that he thought the track would "probably lose to a Muppets song" but added "there's no shame in that". He continued, in an interview with Rolling Stone: "If we are in fact nominated that would be a blast, but none of us are crossing our fingers on that."

The 84th annual Academy Awards takes place on February 26.

Thanks for the report to NME.com.

Comments

[Eifler121]

The Keeper's a sick song, also, this article's very confusing. It says that one list is the complete list, then another is more songs that were on the longlist, and why are there only two nominated songs? I don't understand.

[metallica-#1]

Eifler121 wrote:

The Keeper's a sick song, also, this article's very confusing. It says that one list is the complete list, then another is more songs that were on the longlist, and why are there only two nominated songs? I don't understand.

it's also an article on Bret from FOTC, but then turns into a Matt Berninger interview half way through

[Ironpriest]

haha I saw The Muppets and some of the songs had definite Conchords feel, loved the movie so much, it was actually hillarious.

[Shillaly Bros]

The nomination process for Best Original Song is flawed. Voters rate each song from 6 to 10. There is an incentive to give your preferred songs a "10" and the rest a "6" to maximize the impact of your vote. As a result all but the most uniformly popular songs (Muppets, Rio) are weighed down with low votes and can't make the minimum threshold of 8.25. In a year with so many strong candidates it's a shame that Oscar viewers will only be exposed to two songs...

[soapalot]

Shot, Bret. Good to see a fellow New Zealander getting recognition.

[200tommo791]

After reading about this, I went and listened to the song.

I'm into it. Most defs.