Before "La La Land" was wreaking havoc at the Oscarsmusicals put the ceremony into another mini-crisis in 2008. That was the year in which box office hit Enchanted (Disney children's film starring Amy Adams) nominated for three songs: "Happy Working Song", "So Close" and "That's How You Know". Those tunes lost with a ditty from the lesser-known Irish film Once, titled Falling Slowly.

A year earlier, another popular musical in the form of "Dreamgirls" (which is about a 1960s musical trio and stars Beyoncé) was also nominated for three songs ("Listen," "Love You I Do" and "Patience "). all of which also lost to a film with only one nomination. The winner that time was "I Need to Wake Up" by Davis Guggenheim and "An Inconvenient Truth" by Al Gore. This was the first time a documentary film won the award.

Both outcomes were somewhat controversial at the time, mainly because they were both clear examples of a popular film losing mass appeal to a film that most people had either barely heard of (as was the case with Once Upon a Time ) or had mixed opinions about. (in the "Inconvenient Truth" case). The results also raised an important question: Is it smart to let a film be nominated for three different songs in the first place?

Not only is multiple song nominations for one film unfair to other films hoping to get their shot at an Oscar, but it also doesn't seem like a great strategy for the film itself. The Academy doesn't release its voting data, so we'll never know how it all ended, but there's a chance that both "Dreamgirls" and "Enchanted" were victims of split votes — because even though Oscar voters should ideally judge her each song individually, there is always the risk of mentally putting all the songs from one film together. The fear of this is partly why Disney has chosen not to nominate "We Don't Talk About Bruno" from "Encanto" for an Oscar in 2022, even though that song is one of Disney's biggest hits ever.

"Dreamgirls" and "Enchanted" aren't the only films to have three songs nominated for Oscars (this also happened with Disney's "Beauty and the Beast" and "The Lion King" in the '90s), but they're back at -Loss of backs helped draw attention to the problem. The controversy happened twice in a row and the Academy had no interest in letting it happen a third time. So in June 2008, it announced a new rule: film can only receive two nominations for Best Original Song max.

That rule has remained in effect ever since. Not only did it limit the nominations to two, but it seems to have encouraged films to base their Oscar hopes on just one song. Since the '08 rule change, the only film to have two nominated songs is 2010's The Princess and the Frog, both of which lost again to a film with only one nomination. (This time it was "Crazy Heart" for his song "The Weary Kind.") For the next 15 years, Academy voters were consistently given a much wider range of films to choose from in this category. It's a change few longtime Oscar fans can argue with.