Numlock Awards: How is Flamin' Hot Even Eligible?

Didn't this thing go straight to Disney+?

Numlock Awards is your one-stop awards season newsletter. Every week, join Walt Hickey and Michael Domanico as they break down the math behind the Oscars and the best narratives going into film’s biggest night. Today’s edition comes from Michael.

Hey everyone! 

It’s exciting to be back with you all to dive into some of the categories not covered by Walter’s model. 

We’re going to start with Best Original song, which features two songs from Barbie, one each from the documentary American Symphony and Killers of the Flower Moon, and the obligatory Diane Warren nomination for the Cheetos movie Flamin’ Hot. If we do this newsletter long enough, we may be lucky enough to get Diane Warren songs about other notable PepsiCo products, like Cap’n Crunch’s Berrytastic Pancake Mix or plastic in our waterways. 

Also, please stay tuned until the end, because I need some help from readers determining why Flamin’ Hot was even eligible for an Oscar, and I keep coming to the conclusion it shouldn’t be. 

But first, our winners from most likely to win to least likely: 

“What Was I Made For?” from Barbie, music and lyrics by Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connor

Ah, yes, the feel-good comedy of the summer has its strongest chance of winning with an absolute bummer of a song. Billie Eilish and her brother won this same award a mere two years ago for “No Time to Die” from the Bond movie of the same name, and they’re back with a song that somehow made the top 20 in a bunch of countries. 

I turned to Walter during one of the recent awards ceremonies — I want to say it was the Golden Globes — and said, Isn’t it weird how the Barbie clips package makes the movie look like some super serious issue movie? And he, correctly, turned to me and said, They want Oscars. So here we are, with the song that plays over the overly sentimental montage toward the end. I’ll leave it to Finneas, speaking to Variety, to explain my feelings on this getting nominated versus Dua Lipa’s “Dance the Night”: “And that song [“Dance the Night”] was, by the way, already there when we saw [the movie]. There was no sort of ‘We’re gonna try to beat that.’”

And they didn’t! Both songs are competing at the Grammys this weekend in Song of the Year, though “What Was I Made For?” also picked up a nomination for Record of the Year. We’ve come a long way from Billie looking like she wanted to be anywhere but the Oscars in 2020, since she looks to be cruising to a second win by the age of 22, which would make her the youngest two-time Oscar winner. The second youngest will be Finneas if they pull off the win. 

“I’m Just Ken” from Barbie, music and lyrics by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt

Written by Meryl Streep’s son-in-law, “I’m Just Ken” is the type of irreverent rock ballad you’d expect to rep the Barbie film. While it lost the Golden Globe to “What Was I Made For?,” it did pull out a somewhat surprising win at the Critics’ Choice Awards, at least if you look at Ryan Gosling’s face. Gosling & Co. also dropped an EP at the end of 2023 with a trio of “I’m Just Ken” remixes, including a Christmas version, so they’ve been having fun with it. 

My current take is that “I’m Just Ken” was doomed the instant Margot Robbie lost out on an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. That led to a whole bunch of discourse around how Ken and his theme song got nominated for Oscars, while Barbie herself was missing from Barbie’s nominations haul. Somehow, Hillary Clinton got involved. Long story short, the nomination will likely have to serve as its own reward, given the weirdness around the nomination. 

Still, is there anyone who committed to a musical bit more this year than Ryan Gosling? Speaking to Variety, Ronson recalled watching Gosling record the song: “Ryan put in a fucking shitload of emotion and phrasing. I watched him record the vocal, and he was backing away from the mic because he was using his entire body to sing the song. Whether he was envisioning what it was going to be like to perform in front of the camera in character and he was already entering that zone or it was a subconscious way that he was getting the entire Kendom-ness-land of it all, he brought his whole performance to the song.” 

“It Never Went Away” from American Symphony, music and lyrics by Jon Batiste and Dan Wilson

We have another previous winner here with Jon Batiste, who won an Oscar for Best Original Score for Soul. He also beat out Billie Eilish a few years ago for Album of the Year at the Grammys — don’t worry, she already has an Album of the Year award for her debut album. (Co-writer Dan Wilson has also won a Grammy for Album of the Year, so the awards pedigree all around is pretty stacked.) 

The documentary follows Batiste while he prepares a new symphony while his wife, the writer Suleika Jaouad, undergoes treatment for a cancer recurrence. Speaking to The New York Times, Jaoud said, “I never want to be flattened into ‘the sick girl.’ I said to [director Matthew Heineman], ‘I don’t want to be the dramatic counterpoint to Jon’s meteoric success.’” 

If Batiste wasn’t a previous Oscar winner, he’d probably have a stronger chance here for a very personal documentary with a simple but beautiful ballad for his partner. But the Netflix documentary is drowned out by Barbie and its $1.4 billion at the box office, so he’s an underdog here. 

“Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People)” from Killers of the Flower Moon, music & lyrics by Scott George 

Osage Nation member Scott George joins a relatively short list of indigenous Oscar nominees with this song. Joining him are Robbie Robertson, who posthumously became the first indigenous nominee for Best Original Score, also for Killers, and Lily Gladstone, who landed a Best Actress nod for the same. 

Explaining the meaning behind the song, George told Osage News, “If it wasn’t for God, Wakanda, we wouldn’t be here. So, I’m asking our people to stand up, basically, and be proud of the fact that God created a way for us. So that’s the thought behind it, anyway.” 

Songs in a language other than English are exceptionally rare winners in this category. Over the last 40 years, there have been three (from The Motorcycle Diaries, Slumdog Millionaire, and last year’s RRR), so a win here is unlikely. 

“The Fire Inside” from Flamin’ Hot, music & lyrics by Diane Warren

Another year, another chance to post a blurry screenshot of Diane Warren looking pissed she didn’t win at last year’s ceremony. She’s back for her fifteenth Oscar nomination. The Academy even threw her a bone and gave her an Honorary Award recently, probably in hopes of staving off nominations for songs in movies that are factually inaccurate hagiographies about processed food. 

But also, how? The eligibility rules for the 96th Academy Awards can be found here. Rules Two and Three give us our general rules, which in relevant part are: 

• Films must have a theatrical release for one week, where they are commercially available (i.e., people have to pay for a ticket to see it at a commercial movie theater). 

• The theatrical release has to occur in one of six U.S. metro areas. 

• Film festivals are OK in advance of a theatrical release. 

• Finally, there are some rules for submission deadlines, so you owed the Academy a list of credits by September 15 if your theatrical run occurred between January and June 30, for example. 

Then, there are some special eligibility rules for other nominees, including the Music Branch, which is covered by Rule Eighteen. 

But here’s the thing, Rule Eighteen’s eligibility rules are about the music’s eligibility, not the film’s. So, for example, Best Original Song can only award two statuettes, unless “there are three essentially equal writers of a song,” in which case you can get that bumped up to three statuettes. A fourth statuette needs the sign-off of the Music Branch Executive Committee. There are also some additional submission materials (which I’ve talked about before), things like a digital clip of the song showing how it’s used in the movie. 

You also have references to the theatrical rule requirement in Section III-F, which talks about the potential nominee’s “Los Angeles qualifying run,” so clearly the idea of the nominee being a theatrically distributed movie should apply to the Music nominees. 

I don’t know if Flamin’ Hot actually received a qualifying run! Here’s what I could find: 

• The movie premiered at the SXSW film festival in March of 2023. This would be one of those exceptions Rule Three talks about, saying film festivals are fine prior to a theatrical qualifying run. 

• The film made its way around the festival circuit, also playing at the Miami Film Festival, the Sun Valley Film Festival, and the Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival. 

• After that, it debuted on Hulu and Disney+. 

I could not find a theatrical qualifying run. Box office tracking site The Numbers did not have any grosses for it. Still, that doesn’t mean there wasn’t a qualifying run, since post-pandemic box office reporting is a lot wonkier than pre-pandemic times. On Searchlight Pictures’ own press site, they list June 9, 2023, as the release date — the date it debuted on Hulu and Disney+. I even scoured producer DeVon Franklin’s Instagram to see if there was any evidence of a theatrical run, but all of the promotional clips he shared had to do with audience reactions at festivals. There was even a screening at the White House, but unfortunately D.C. is not one of the six qualifying metros, nor is the White House a commercial theater. (The White House screening happened the week after the movie dropped on Disney+/Hulu, so it’s irrelevant anyway.)  

So I’m left here wondering why Diane Warren is scoring an Oscar nomination instead of trying to lose an Emmy. Someone, please explain to me how this song was deemed eligible by AMPAS. If it was granted a waiver, I’d also be curious as to why.

Did you, a friend, or a loved one see Flamin’ Hot in theaters? Or, at the very least, see that it was in theaters at some point? Please let us know.