Well, well. Here's some welcome news. After this year's much balleyhooed disaster with the Best Foreign Film Oscar noms -- recap: lauded Romanian Cannes winner 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days somehow didn't even make it onto the Oscar shortlist -- The Envelope's Mark Olsen reports that a rule change has been voted in for next year's event. Now, I don't like to get too worked up about the Oscars -- it's such an insidery, backpatting schmoozefest of the "You're great!" "No, you're great!" variety -- but last year's foreign noms really pissed me off.

I wasn't as enarmored of 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days as many of my fellow critics were, but even so, it's a masterful, tensely drawn piece of filmmaking, it won the Palme d'or and gave critics worldwide a collective cinematic orgasm, and it damn sure deserved not just to be shortlisted, but to make the final cut of nominees. That it wasn't nominated was a travesty, and confirmed the ongoing suspicion of many in the film community that many of the people in the Academy who are charged with making decisions around foreign film noms are a pack of drooling idiots.

If you comb through the Oscar nominees from the past 79 years, it might look like a pretty decent list of quality films. But if you start to consider the titles that weren't nominated, you can get a more complete picture of just how badly they have failed to represent the broad spectrum. It's easy to find neglected Best Picture contenders that weren't nominated (Touch of Evil, Vertigo, 2001: A Space Odyssey, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Do the Right Thing, Mulholland Drive, etc.), but a bit harder to sift through some of the other categories.

A recent report in Variety looks at the most dubious and most annoying category, Best Song. Music expert Jon Burlingame goes through ten years and finds ten glaring examples of songs not nominated, including "Someday My Prince Will Come" from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" from Meet Me in St. Louis (1944), "A Hard Day's Night" from A Hard Day's Night (1964) and anything from Saturday Night Fever (1977). The winner in 1977 was "You Light Up My Life" by Debby Boone from a movie called You Light Up My Life that has apparently been almost entirely forgotten.

Nothing, ever, will top a giant marquee in front of an auditorium of rich, white people that reads "IT'S HARD OUT HERE FOR A PIMP." (As Kim said, "Have there ever been that many black people at the Oscars at one time?") They may as well cancel the Oscars right now, because everything else is going to be downhill. Disappointingly, the performance by Three 6 Mafia continues the strange, slow motion acting that was featured in the background of the Crash song - whose idea was that, exactly? Is one of those people supposed to be Terrence Howard? I see that all the women are wearing very short skirts, so they're probably either ho's or high school students.

And yet another Oscar first: A best song performance ending on a glory note that happens to be "PIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIMP!"