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.