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Remember how I said that if you truly love the Oscars, you have to love the smaller categories? Well, there are exceptions to that rule. Two categories are a constant source of derision and ridicule from even the most obsessed Oscar followers: Best Foreign Language Film and Best Original Song. As a passionate defender of the Best Original Song category, I frequently get into shouting matches, barroom brawls, and dance marathon competitions with people who dare to criticize it. Still, in years like this, you can understand the reasons why people claim that the category is obsolete.

Go ahead, name an original song written for a movie released in 2011. Did you name a song from The Muppets? No, I'm not psychic, it's just that there were so few memorable songs from movies last year. Most years there are a couple of songs that get a lot of attention, either because they are from high-profile films or because they are by high-profile performers. Sometimes the song itself is the story, as when “It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp” won. But this year only one of the likely Best Picture nominees has a memorable song, and all of the other contenders are either from films that were mostly ignored or from films that will be hard for the Academy to take seriously.

There are three kinds of Best Original Song nominees. There are musical numbers, which usually have a pretty easy time getting in (Dreamgirls and Enchanted clogged this category) especially since the songs have to be seen by voters in the context they were used in the film. This puts another type of nominee at a disadvantage: ballads. While Diane Warren used to be ridiculous in this category for her heartfelt, emotionally wrought ballads, most of those are used during the closing credits of films. It is difficult to get too worked up about a song just by hearing it while watching over rolling credits, so unless the song is from a high-profile film it will have difficulty getting in.

The last kind of nominee is the upbeat pop song. These types of songs are usually by famous bands or singers and are featured in popular films, probably during some kind of wacky montage. These songs often have difficulty getting in, though; for every “Accidentally in Love” from Shrek 2 there is a “THAT SONG” from Chicken Little, which is basically the same song but got no attention. A lot of luck is involved in this category, more so than probably any other. Also, sometimes they only nominate three or four songs, which is weird.

That being said, here are the most legitimate contenders, all of which fit into one of those three song types. Sometimes the songwriters will throw a curveball and nominate something from a foreign film (The Chorus and The Motorcycle Diaries being recent example of this habit), but as I haven't seen or heard of any of the foreign films with songs on the 37-song shortlist this year, I'm not gonna pretend that I have any idea about their chances. Let's just all pretend they don't exist.

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