The Best Oscar Songs

The Oscars are Sunday! So, to celebrate this most auspicious and likely disappointing of award ceremonies, I thought it would be fun to do a list for you to contemplate.

The classic Oscar winner for Best Original Song falls into one of two categories: Show-stopping musical number or radio hit squeezed into an unrelated film to sell more singles. Reading the list of past winners and losers is like reading a list of the schmaltziest, most ridiculous songs of all time. From “White Christmas” to “My Heart Will Go On,” Oscar voters have proven time and again that their ear for music is about as strong and varied as a grandmother who kissed her first boy at the picture shows watching The Jazz Singer for a nickel a seat.

Recent years haven’t proven these trends to be dead or irrelevant. If your song is in a Disney movie, you’ve got yourself a nomination, no matter what. But it seems that, for all the bullshit, every once in a while, hipper heads prevail. For all the complete nonsense (see: “You’ll Be In My Heart” beating “Blame Canada” in one of the most bizarre Oscar races ever), some songs get nominated that blow your mind, like Bjork’s and Thom Yorke’s “I’ve Seen It All” from Dancer In The Dark, which, though it didn’t win, has to be the most hipsterish song ever nominated (or at least tied with Elliot Smith’s “Miss Misery” from Good Will Hunting).

This year will likely see another great song winning, in the form of T-Bone Burnett and Ryan Bingham’s “The Weary Kind,” or another Disney tune, but let’s take a look back at some of the best songs to ever win the Oscar for Best Original Song:

The Best Oscar Songs

By: Christian Hagen

“Falling Slowly” by Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova (aka The Swell Season), Once [2007]

Possibly the best and most surprising song choice in Oscar history, Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova, stars of the ultra-low budget indie love story Once, startled viewers by defeating three songs from Disney’s bloated live-action princess story Enchanted, in a quintessential “Old Hollywood” v. “New Hollywood” race. Listening to the song, it’s easy to see how it won; Hansard’s mighty bellow met Irglova’s meek voice in a beautifully intimate and stirring love song that grows and bears fruit slowly and stirringly. Unlike the pizzaz and drama of Disney’s work, and the racial/religious sensitivity training of August Rush’s “Raise It Up,” “Falling Slowly” was simply two people singing to one another and joining into a chorus of brilliant orchestrations; there was heart, there was passion, there was everything that was missing from every other nominee’s hackneyed attempts to play into the hands of the theater geeks whose pencils were on the voting ballot.

“Lose Yourself” by Eminem, 8 Mile [2002]

As 2002’s awards ceremony loomed, the talk of the town was split between The Two Towers, and the possibility of a fantasy film actually taking the big prize, and Chicago, and the supposed return of the musical genre. With so much focus on Chicago, in particular, it was all the more unlikely that the musical story of the 2002 Academy Awards would, in fact, be Eminem, that most controversial of mainstream rappers making his first attempt at acting in the semi-autobiographical 8 Mile. But indeed, the story shifted, and “Lose Yourself,” Em’s anthemic ode to the power of music and following your dreams, became the first hip-hop song to ever win the award. And, as cheesy as it might be, it’s hard to deny that “Lose Yourself” is actually a good, deserving song. True, it’s basically rap music for the old white people who hate rap music, but it’s undoubtedly effective, and considering Eminem’s rags-to-riches life story, it’s actually surprisingly inspiring, if you’re willing to give it a chance. The historic award win may have been tarnished a few short years later as Three 6 Mafia, of all people, walked off with a statue for rapping about pimpin’, but that shouldn’t diminish the importance of this song. It might not be true to the streets, but it’s truer than most Oscar songs, and that is definitely worth something.

“Theme From Shaft“ by Isaac Hayes, Shaft [1971]

Who can say exactly what the old-school, whitecentric Academy voters had in mind in 1971 (maybe they heard the song while snorting coke at Studio 54), but somehow, inexplicably, Isaac Hayes’s funky, excellent soul jam netted him the first non-acting Oscar ever awarded to an African-American. Until Eminem’s big win 31 years later, giving the Oscar to “Theme From Shaft” was the closest the Academy ever came to being cool. And cool is something this song has in spades. From the two-and-a-half minute long intro to Isaac Hayes’s soulful voice bantering with his sultry backup singers about a man who’s simply too much of a bad mother-(shut your mouth!) to contain, it’s one awesome track that perhaps epitomizes the funk genre. The seductive powers of this song cannot be overstated; the number of women made pregnant to the wah-wah of the guitar on this one track led to a spike in the number of soul singers that has given us every major African-American vocalist for the last twenty years.* I mean, the harrowing legend of John Shaft must go down in history as one of the most badass of all time if for no other reason than his theme song. If that’s not damned impressive to you, well, I don’t know what to do for you.

*Can’t possibly prove this, but wouldn’t it be great if I could?

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…You might be thinking to yourself, “Wait, only three songs? That’s the whole list?”

Yes.

I’d love to say that it’s just because I got lazy and didn’t want to squeeze in any more material because wading through all these Oscar songs is so exhausting. But in all honesty and seriousness, these are the only three songs worth a damn to ever win an Oscar for Best Original Song. I mean, have you SEEN this list? The ’80s alone are chock full of some of the worst songs ever written. Outside of what’s on this list, every award-winning song is either a showtune or a Disney end credit theme song. Even when a good song does get nominated, once every five or ten years, it almost never wins; the more Hallmark the theme, the more gold the composer’s gonna see. So watch the Oscar telecast on Sunday, and ask yourself: How can people with musical tastes this shitty ever give an award to anyone for anything?