By Bob Tourtellotte

LOS ANGELES, Dec 15 (Reuters) - Oscar officials have refused to revive a dormant category for musicals at the Academy Awards, leaving some filmmakers singing the blues after a campaign to restore the genre to its old Hollywood prominence.

Officials at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which gives out the movie industry's top honors, decided on Tuesday there were not enough movies in the musical category to meet Academy Award standards.

The decision was made even though there were enough -- five, in all -- to make the category eligible for revival. Filmmaker Dan Mirvish, who spearheaded the effort, claimed the Academy was biased against independent films.

"I can't tell you the number of times I talked to Academy staff over the months who said, 'If you are eligible, it doesn't matter how big the film is. It doesn't matter how good the film is. If it's eligible, it's eligible," Mirvish told Reuters.

After recent years of musical spectacles like "Moulin Rouge" and "Chicago," Hollywood has set about reviving the movie musical.

This year is a banner year with Andrew Lloyd Webber's splashy "The Phantom of the Opera," actor Kevin Spacey's flashy "Beyond the Sea" and the soulful "Ray". The problem is, none of these movies qualify as musicals, since their
tunes were not composed originally for the movies.

Mirvish's films do qualify. He made "Open House," about a day in the life of house hunters in Los Angeles. He and partner Robert Peters also produced "Big in Germany," a $5,000 movie about a self-help therapist on a book tour in Germany.

The other films that would have been eligible were puppet movie "Team America: World Police" by "South Park" creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the Disney cartoon "Home on the Range," and "Greendale," rock star Neil Young's movie about people in a small California town.

In a statement, the Academy's Board of Governors said it concluded three of the five films would be guaranteed nominations, and that such a ratio was "not in keeping with the level of accomplishment" needed for an Oscar nomination.

"It's very disheartening that they would actually eliminate a category that for a long time defined Hollywood," said "Greendale" producer Elliot Rabinowitz.
Reuters/VNU