So when we heard that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had banned the score to The Dark Knight from Oscar eligibility on a technicality, we were furious – it was easily the biggest Oscars outrage since Geri Halliwell’s turn in The Fat Slags didn’t win Best Supporting Actress in 2004.

But the good news is that the Academy has reversed its decision – now The Dark Knight’s score can lose to the Alvin & The Chipmunks OST like nature intended.

In these times of trouble, it’s only right that the big winner at next year’s Oscars should be a dark, sprawling, dense epic where nobody can easily be defined as good or evil. Sadly, however, Ace Ventura Jr wasn’t released theatrically, so maybe it’ll have to be The Dark Knight instead.

For a whole host of reasons – including the scale of ambition, the sophistication of storytelling, the box office totals, the death of Heath Ledger and the fact that most people would rather stick a shotgun under their chin than watch another film about Sean Penn weeping at injustice – The Dark Knight is slowly emerging as something of an Oscars frontrunner.

It seems like there isn’t an Oscars category that The Dark Knight won’t do well in, aside from two. The first is Best Actor – unless there’s a new subcategory this year entitled Best Actor With A Voice That Sounds Like A Brick In A Blender, of course, in which case it stands a pretty good chance – and the second is Best Score.

Or at least it was. A month ago, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided that it was going to ban Hans Zimmer’s score for The Dark Knight because it made the mistake of listing everyone who contributed music to the movie to its cue sheet instead of just the principle composers.

It was a double slap in the face for Zimmer and The Dark Knight, not just because of the innovative, cutting-edge nature of the soundtrack, but because the score’s lead single – Disturbing Machine Buzzing Drone Number Four – has been number one in the hit parade around the world for almost two solid months now.

So let’s all be thankful that the academy has finally decided to reverse its decision and include it on the ballot once and for all, as Reuters reports:

After reviewing the submission, [the academy] concluded that Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard were the main composers and deemed the duo’s work for Warner Bros.’ Batman blockbuster as eligible. The academy said that since ballots had not been mailed, the decision would not affect the voting process.

That’s wonderful news. It’s encouraging to see that the academy is able to recognise a piece of groundbreaking work and adjust its rules to include it from time to time. What’s more, this now means that Oscar voters have another category to seriously consider The Dark Knight in before they choosing to vote for Wall-E like they were all going to anyway.

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So, come Oscar night, you’d expect that The Dark Knight would wipe the floor with the competition – especially since the competition seems to be a million underperforming films about gloomy people from 35 years ago – but you’re wrong.

It’s just been announced that The Dark Knight can’t win the Oscar for Best Score because it was composed by too many people. That’ll be disappointing for the crew of The Dark Knight, but they’ll get over it – not least because the 2009 Oscars will introduce categories for Best Irredeemably Bleak Summer Movie and Silliest And Most Indecipherable Voice Employed By A Lead Actor, which The Dark Knight is already a dead cert for.

Even before it was released, there was a heavy Oscar buzz surrounding The Dark Knight, and it was all down to Heath Ledger. By a) giving possibly the performance of his life as The Joker and b) dying young, Heath Ledger was guaranteed at least a nomination for Best Supporting Actor from the get-go.

But then The Dark Knight was released, and it seemed like Best Supporting Actor would be the tip of the iceberg. The script was dark and thematically complex, the cinematography was brave and experimental, the box office numbers were galactic, the costumes were pretty and – most importantly for Oscar voters – the film went on for about an hour longer than it should have done and featured endless scenes of a frowning man gazing into the middle distance.

To the casual observer, it looked as though The Dark Knight would win every single Oscar that it put itself in for, but already that’s not the case. The bleak, creepy score for The Dark Knight has been ruled ineligible for the Oscars, and it’s all thanks to the number of people who worked on it.

Apparently, Academy rules state that only the primary composer of a film’s score should be included on the cue sheet, but for The Dark Knight the names of everyone who added pieces of music to the score were added, and now it’s been disqualified. MTV reports:

Although the five people listed as composers on “The Dark Knight” — including Zimmer, [James Newton] Howard, music editor Alex Gibson, ambient music designer Mel Wesson and composer Lorne Balfe — signed an affidavit stating that Zimmer and Howard were the primary composers, the majority of the Academy sided against the duo’s eligibility.

Now, being disqualified from the Oscars for a minor technicality like that is bound to sting, but it’s not the end of the world for The Dark Knight. Here’s why:

1 - By adding Gibson, Balfe and Wesson to the cue sheet for The Dark Knight, Hans Zimmer has ensured that they’ll all receive royalties from the score’s use, so at least he gets the moral high ground.

2 - The Dark Knight is still pushing hard in the Best Picture category – the only Oscar that people actually care about – and at this point it’s hard to see how it could lose.

3 – Does anyone go and see a movie for the score? No they don’t. A win in this category isn’t exactly going to boost DVD sales, is it?

4 - This is the main reason. If The Dark Knight has been disqualified for entering its score into the Oscars, then it means none of it can be performed in one of those interminable musical interludes that bloat the Oscars ceremony out. And you know what that means? More avant garde performances featuring Latvian women dressed as little Dutch girls singing in a made-up language and hitting bicycles for percussion. Yay for that!

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