Full disclosure: we love Randy Newman! Go get yourself a copy of his 1974 masterpiece Good Old Boys and you'll see what we're talking about. And that's why we're so pissed that over the last 20 years he's turned himself into a Xerox machine of his own talent, churning out increasingly more faded copies of his once original songs for animated Disney soundtracks.

The Oscar mafia has been encouraging him by awarding him 3,518 Academy Award nominations for masterpieces like “You've Got a Friend in Me” and “Yes, Massa Katzenberg, Another One Coming Right Away!”

Last Tuesday nominations were announced for the awards and (surprise!) two of Newman's songs from The Princess and the Frog will be battling it out for the shiny statuette.

Which Randy Newman song that sounds like all the other Randy Newman songs since the 1980s, yet is definitely inferior to the ones that sound like that on the early albums, do you think will win?

[Weird English/German mashup of “Almost There” and Randy's live version of “Down in New Orleans,” after the jump.]

BONUS: Fred Armisen doing a spot-on Randy Newman (forward to 00:20)

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