This madness must end. For too long have we watched, eyes rolling practically out of our skulls, as year after year Diane Warren sits in the Dolby Theater watching another Oscar pass her by. At one time—back when hits like “How Do I Live” and “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” were up for Best Original Song—a win might’ve made sense for the prolific, iconic songwriter. These days, her annual nomination and loss has become something like a tradition, at once laughable and cruel. “Dear Me,” written for her own documentary, Diane Warren: Relentless, has landed Warren her seventeenth nomination. It will also very likely be her seventeenth loss. The fact is, none of this bizarre charade would be happening if the Academy would finally wake up and find some sense. It’s high time they ditched the Oscar for Best Original Song.
An inconvenient truth to start: The list of Best Original Song winners over the last few decades does include a lot of bangers. Sure, some song from Emilia Pérez won last year—remember Emilia Pérez?—but bad wins are hardly the rule. Billie Eilish’s Barbie soundtrack song “What Was I Made For?”—a huge hit and a great song—won the year prior. The year before that, the award went to the wonderful “Naatu Naatu,” from Tollywood sensation RRR. The list of 2010s honorees includes “Man or Muppet,” “Skyfall,” “Let It Go,” “City of Stars,” and “Shallow.” Digging into the nominees, though, the hit rate drops drastically. It’s one thing to have only five great winners in a decade—not like the Oscars are particularly known for getting things right—but when there are only seven or eight more plausibly worthy winners among the nominees across ten years, it’s a bad sign. And that’s with me being generous to “Happy” and that one song from “The Greatest Showman.”
The state of the Best Original Song category is, to put it mildly, dismal. A joke of an award, whose cachet is limited to the fact that it's a key stepping-stone to an EGOT for musicians who don't act. Theoretically the award's existence provides an easy selection of songs to be performed during the Oscar telecast—except that the telecast doesn’t even broadcast performances of all the nominated songs every time out. Last year, the Original Song performances were scrapped entirely, because even the Oscars producers seem to recognize nobody wants to hear all that. The move spoke volumes: Why should anyone respect an award for songs nobody wants to hear?
This year’s nominees represent some new nadir. Along with Warren’s latest, there’s “Sweet Dreams of Joy,” from a movie nobody’s ever heard of called Viva Verdi!. Nick Cave and Bryce Dessner (cool, admittedly) are nominated for “Train Dreams,” from the motion picture Train Dreams. Then there’s “I Lied to You,” the centerpiece song in Ryan Coogler’s musical vampire phantasmagoria Sinners—easily the worthiest song of the bunch, though it faces stiff competition from perhaps the most egregious nominee of all. “Golden” is an undeniable hit. The big single from the smash Netflix animated movie KPop Demon Hunters went to No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 and its almost guaranteed onstage performance during the Oscars will certainly draw viewers. It’s a catchy, if silly song, and given its pop culture status, would be a fine enough winner—except that shouldn’t even be eligible.
Now, I don’t make the rules—though I should be—but it does seem absurd that Netflix could get the movie qualified for the Oscars by opening KPop Demon Hunters on just three movie screens in New York and California, with basically no advertising, on the same day it hit streaming. A bare-minimum qualifying run, before Netflix ever had an inkling about what a gargantuan success it would become, and now one of the biggest studios in Hollywood—one that's poised to gobble up Warner Bros. and become even bigger—is being rewarded by the Oscars after flouting movie theaters all these years. The film’s Best Animated Feature nomination may be even more offensive, but this is an anti-Best Original Song screed, so let’s consider the complaint lodged.
Now, wherever one falls on the KPop Demon Hunters eligibility issue, the bigger issue is the poor slate of nominees overall. Sinners and KPop Demon Hunters may be good gets for the Oscars, but yet another Diane Warren track, and yet another unknown song from an unknown, four-walled movie should not be in the mix at a serious award show. Even that Cave/Dessner track, while nice enough, is basically ephemeral, playing only during the film’s end credits—you know, the credits Netflix automatically interrupts anyway. What could possibly be the point of nominating songs like this, which clearly only exist in order to be a potential nominee?
Even to the degree that there is a strong community of music people in the film business who might like to pat each other on the back and reward their friends, Best Original Song nominations tend to lack merit. Especially when so many actually good and worthwhile movie songs—like Japanese Breakfast’s “My Baby (Got Nothing at All)” from Materialists, and Daniel Blumberg and Amanda Seyfried’s “Clothed by the Sun” from The Testament of Ann Lee—didn’t even make the shortlist.
It wasn’t always like this. The Best Original Song award’s track record is historically pretty spotty, but not entirely undignified. Through much of the ‘30s and ‘40s, when movies were a primary vehicle for promoting new songs, and musicals were all the rage, the number of nominees would reach up to ten. Many of those songs, like many Oscar nominees in general, are basically forgotten at this point, but at the time they represented a different reality in Hollywood, in which original songs were a major part of the machinery. That reality continued on through the ‘50s, but started breaking down through the ‘60s with the collapse of the studio musical. The ‘70s still offered a halfway decent smattering of among a growing number of duds from movies for whom Original Song was their only nomination.
But the next decade, things shifted back around. With the rise of the movie soundtrack album through the ‘80s, producing great original songs for movies was the name of the game. “Fame,” “9 to 5,” “Endless Love,” “Up Where We Belong,” “Eye of the Tiger,” “What a Feeling (Flashdance),” “Maniac,” “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” “Against All Odds,” “Footloose,” Ghostbusters,” “Say You, Say Me,” “The Power of Love,” “Take My Breath Away”—I could go on. The ‘90s brought even bigger movie soundtrack successes, and also the Disney Renaissance, which spawned even more future classics. The 70 Academy Awards had “My Heart Will Go On” beating out a song from Disney’s Hercules, Trisha Yearwood's version of the Warren-penned “How Do I Live,” from Con Air—the story behind that one is wild, I promise you—and Elliott Smith’s incredible “Miss Misery” from Good Will Hunting.
As soon as the 2000s arrived, though, things started to go sour. The winners were mostly mediocre, and the nominees even worse. Occasional classics like Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” or “Falling Slowly” from Once hardly make up for “I Need to Wake Up” from An Inconvenient Truth or the three songs it beat out from Dreamgirls, added to the musical for Oscar consideration. It’s no coincidence that the slow death of Best Original Song started during the decade piracy shook up the music industry and iTunes killed album sales. Streaming only hammered the final nail in the coffin. What we have now is a patchwork prize, often bestowed on decent winners, but from a dwindling pool of worthwhile nominees. Having to rely on the few musicals still being produced, and the few other films commissioning original songs has rendered it a dead category walking.
While finally putting the category to rest is what Best Original Song deserves, it’s understandable that the Music Branch of the Academy would bristle at the suggestion. Representation at the Oscars is no small thing—just ask Hollywood casting directors and stunt coordinators. So maybe reform is the key. The first thing to do is tighten up eligibility. Documentaries screened for a week in one empty theater should not be eligible for Oscars just because they’ve got an original song in them. And something needs to be done about the favoritism. Not that such a thing can be completely avoided, but rules should be put in place that dissuade the annual Diane Warren vote from her friends in the branch. Additionally, the Academy should go back to the days when the number of nominees could vary based on the number of worthy songs. A number of years during the 2000s saw only three nominees. In 2011, there were only two. That’s as it should be, if the award is to be an honest one.
Still, I think a more radical solution is in order. Kill the award for Best Original Song, and replace it. Though it sounds nice to specifically reward the craft involved in created a song, perhaps it’s time to recognize the people who make those original songs possible, and songs in movies more broadly. The Academy should follow the lead of the new Best Casting award, handed to casting directors, and create a Best Music Supervision prize, given to the music supervisors who put movie soundtracks together. Perhaps make it contingent on a film featuring a certain number of original songs to continue incentivizing their creation. Not only would it be a better representation of the film industry work that goes into putting music in movies, it would award some of the most under-recognized figures in the industry. Since movies have had sound, they’ve had songs. Original and not. It seems fitting to honor the people actually responsible for making that beautiful marriage possible.