Marc Shaiman, who was announced as musical director for the 82nd Oscar show on Monday morning, has a long and colorful history with the Academy Awards.
He received the first of his five Academy nominations 16 years ago, and was delighted to lose to Bruce Springsteen.
Six years later, he was not so happy about losing to Phil Collins.
He ticked off Keith Carradine before one Oscar show, angered Burt Bacharach leading up to another, and cost the Academy tens of thousands of dollars by persuading the show’s producers to hire an entire orchestra they didn’t really want. (He was, by the way, absolutely right to do so.)
He co-wrote one of the liveliest Oscar songs of recent years, “Blame Canada,” and came to the ceremony in a powder-blue pimp suit, complete with feather boa. (At left, he appears on the red carpet flanked by co-writers Trey Parker and Matt Stone; photo, Long Photography/AMPAS.)
And while he’s only served as the musical director once before, he has been responsible for some of the most indelible musical moments on the Oscar show over the past 20 years -- co-writing the medleys in which host Billy Crystal paid tribute to the Best Picture nominees with song parodies.
A film composer who was nominated three times for his scores to “The American President,” “The First Wives Club” and “Patch Adams” (yes, believe it or not, “Patch Adams” was an Oscar nominee), Shaiman’s biggest impact on the Oscars has come with the “Wonderful Night for Oscar” medleys.
“We just thought, how can we make fun of those Oscar production numbers?” Shaiman said of the genesis of the medley. “It’s … a chance to do an entertaining musical number that has the cushion of irony so needed for the modern world to accept anything musical.”
Over the years, Shaiman said he and Crystal learned that it was easier to get permission from the songs’ publishers if Crystal made the appeal himself -- though that didn’t help them when they tried to set the Oliver Stone film “JFK” to music, and were turned down both by the publishers of “Fiddler on the Roof” (who didn’t want their song “Tradition” recast as “Suspicion”) and “The Music Man” (who similarly vetoed a rewrite of “Trouble”).
Eventually, they persuaded the publishers of the pop standard “Three Coins in the Fountain” to allow them to turn it into “Three Shots in the Plaza.”
Shaiman’s first experience as a nominee came with the 1993 song “A Wink and a Smile,” from “Sleepless in Seattle.” The song’s original performer was Harry Connick Jr., who declined to perform the song on the Oscar show. The search for a replacement ranged far and wide, including everyone from David Bowie to Bob Hope, before settling on Tony Bennett, who agreed and then withdrew a couple of weeks before the show.
By the time of the nominees luncheon, Shaiman was agreeable enough with the replacement choice of Keith Carradine -- but he was still smarting from Connick’s initial decision to pass, and feeling like, he said, “such category-filler.”
