Oscar’s most maligned category may end up in a real superstar duel next March, with Paul McCartney facing off against U2 or teen popster Miley Cyrus going up against bestselling tenor Andrea Bocelli.
Or it could feature pop songstresses (Leona Lewis, Duffy), alternative rockers (They Might Be Giants, Karen O), rappers (Nas, Pitbull), celebrated songwriters (Jackson Browne, Randy Newman) and newcomers (Ryan Bingham, 15-year-old Clyde Lawrence).
The 63 songs eligible for the Academy Award offer all of those possibilities, and many more.
The best original song category can be infuriating, its rules maddening and its oversights inexplicable -- but it also presents a wildly diverse slate from which to choose, good songs and bad songs and occasionally great songs that have been either smoothly integrated or awkwardly shoehorned into movies.
It took a few days of searching, but I’ve now heard all 63 of the eligible songs, from “All Is Love” to “You’ve Been a Friend to Me.” (Full disclosure: I’ve heard 56 of them in their entirety, and portions of the final seven.)
So here’s a rundown of the songs that from here will go through a strange process.
The producers of each film are required to submit a clip, no longer than three minutes, of the scene from the film in which the song appears. All 63 of those clips will be assembled, in random order, and then shown to members of the Academy’s music branch, either at a screening or on DVD. Voters will score each song on a scale of 6 to 10, and the five highest-scoring songs (provided they have an average of at least 8.25) will be nominated.
The process usually works to the advantage of songs that are performed onscreen over songs that are simply heard in the background, and it’s murder on songs that are only heard over the end credits.
Which means that the two eligible songs from Rob Marshall’s musical “Nine” ought to have a leg up on the competition. And they probably do – particularly “Cinema Italiano,” the brassy uptempo romp sung by Kate Hudson in one of the film’s most delirious dance numbers. Will it hurt that the song is far longer on energy than melody, and that it doesn’t really go anywhere? Probably not, I’m afraid.
The other song from “Nine,” Marion Cotillard’s showpiece scorned-wife ballad “Take It All,” is more dramatically important and a better song; it also works better onscreen than on CD, where it’s a bit overstated and undersung.
Another true musical is Disney’s animated “The Princess and the Frog,” which contains eight new Randy Newman songs, four of which were submitted to the Academy. I can’t shake the feeling that Newman, a brilliant songwriter, was writing much of the movie on autopilot, although “Down in New Orleans” (sung by Dr.
