Categories One-by-One: Original Song

[anonymous1980]

Had I known "This is Me" wouldn't win, I probably wouldn't have listened to it. What an earworm of a song.

Now you gotta send the flood to drown it out.

Yeah, I know. Bad joke. But I got no apologies...THIS IS ME!

[Okri]

Had I known "This is Me" wouldn't win, I probably wouldn't have listened to it. What an earworm of a song.

[Big Magilla]

How about liking La La Land because it was good?

That would be O.K., but it would fit an entirely different scenario.

[criddic3]

How about liking La La Land because it was good?

[Big Magilla]

I thought the Trump comment was hilarious, albeit in reverse.

I have a relative by marriage (the wife of a second cousin) who finds all these conservative sources, some of which I'm sure are Russian bots, that she sends out on Facebook in praise of Trump and against Obama, Clinton, Pelosi, et. al. on a daily basis. No matter how many "similar posts" I ban on a daily basis she finds another source. I've gone from anger to feeling sorry for the kids and grandkids that have to listen to it to just shaking my head that she doesn't get it. I feel the same way about the La La Land/Greatest Showman comparison.

The same people who marveled at the stopping traffic on the L.A. freeway opening number in La La Land to the dreadful singing of Ryan Gosling and underwhelming singing of Emma Stone are all over the internet ridiculing the absurdity of the plot and the songs that drive the plot in Greatest Showman. It may not be a great score, but it is a feel-good one that you can sing along with like you can with a good Broadway score.

Liking La La Land because it's something different could be compared to liking Trump because he brings something different to the presidency. Liking The Greatest Showman because it's comfortably old-fashioned while being progressively all-inclusive, is more in line with preferring to have Obama or someone like him in the White House.

As to whether This Is Me or Remember Me is the better song, to me it's like comparing apples to oranges. They're both good and they both deserve to be nominated. Remember Me make have a shorter verse, but it's sung four times in the movie, each time in a different way. It's very cleverly done and impossible not to like. I'd be happy with a win for either one.

[The Original BJ]

You should really apologize to the rest of us for suggesting that our preference of Greatest Showman to La La Land is any way equivalent to support of Trump.

My goodness. I said it was a comparison that I had similar trouble wrapping my head around. I didn't accuse any of you of being Trump supporters for having "Never Enough" on loop on Spotify. Just take a deep breath, I'm not trying to start anything here.

[OscarGuy]

You should really apologize to the rest of us for suggesting that our preference of Greatest Showman to La La Land is any way equivalent to support of Trump.

And the narrative for Lady Gaga and Diane Warren to win had nothing to do with her being everywhere. It had to do with the song being from a movie that exposed campus rape and being a song that acted as a type of rallying cry for survivors of sexual assault and abuse to tell those who had never experienced such events that they shouldn't judge unless it's happened to you. It came out a couple of years too early to hit the #MeToo zeitgeist, but it's message still resonates even if you thought it was a "weak" song.

[The Original BJ]

During the run-up to that Oscar presentation, it was easy to forget that Till It Happens to You came from a documentary that no one saw and most had never even heard of (right now, I can't even remember the name).

It's also really just worth reiterating that "Till It Happens To You" isn't exactly that great of a song either -- it's not like it was a Lady Gaga chart-topper that had huge cultural impact. In fact, most of what seemed to make it such a front-runner was pure narrative -- Gaga was everywhere that awards season, winning a Globe for American Horror Story, performing this song at the PGA Awards, doing the David Bowie tribute at the Grammys, headlining the Super Bowl. Most pundits seemed to think Oscar was just the next stop on her tour -- for a song that even carried with it some controversy about how little she actually wrote of it -- but on its face the song was a pretty weak candidate.

This isn't to say that "Writing's on the Wall" was anything spectacular either, but I thought the amount of outrage Sam Smith received in some circles was ludicrous, as if topping a Diane Warren number was evidence of some great desecration of musical standards. (Though his self-aggrandizing speech certainly didn't help.)

I also have to say that I feel like I must be hearing different music than those who prefer The Greatest Showman's score to La La Land's. That preference is about on par with "Thank god we've got Trump in the White House instead of Obama" as an incomprehensible comparison to me. (With apologies to Pasek & Paul for suggesting anything they do deserves to be compared to the goon in the Oval Office.)

[Mister Tee]

The only song from a true flop movie I can recall over those years was I Just Called to Say I Love You...but there, you had a genuine luminary in Stevie Wonder, and a song that had got to number one on the charts.

Just a few years earlier "Last Dance" from Thank God It's Friday won.

It was a pretty terrible movie, but, relative to its budget -- and largely thanks to the continuing Saturday Night Fever/disco craze -- something of a hit, and the song was a top-five charter for disco queen Donna Summer. It's not the strongest example of the era, but not in Till It Happens to You territory.

[Greg]

The only song from a true flop movie I can recall over those years was I Just Called to Say I Love You...but there, you had a genuine luminary in Stevie Wonder, and a song that had got to number one on the charts.

Just a few years earlier "Last Dance" from Thank God It's Friday won.

[Sabin]

Mister Tee wrote
On BJ's warning, I've stayed away from The Greatest Showman, but I watched what was available of This Is Me on YouTube, and...I don't know what some of you are hearing. I think both of this songwriting team's songs from last year were infinitely superior to this effort. This Is Me reminds me of those Disney cartoon power ballads, all of which are utterly bland/hard to distinguish from one another, and all seem like they could double as gay coming-out anthems.

...and they pretty much all won.

Really difficult category to handicap. The one thing I do know is that I won't be predicting my favorite song of the lineup, "Mystery of Love." However, listening to Sufjan Stevens perform at the Oscars will be one of the highlights of the night for me. It's something I never thought I'd see.

[Mister Tee]

I'll never forget the Best Original Song debacle two years ago. Lady Gaga performs "Til It Happens to You" and everyone watching is transfixed. It's a powerful moment. Of course she'll win. Then the presenters come out and the Oscar goes to that Sam Smith abortion from Spectre. (He then has the balls to claims he's the first openly gay man to win an Oscar.) If that can happen, clearly the broader context/moment has no influence on voting.

Actually, I'd argue that the broader context DOES matter, but that broader context isn't how hyped the song is, or in what ways it speaks to the zeitgeist, but the far simpler matter of Did people see/like the film from which it came? During the run-up to that Oscar presentation, it was easy to forget that Till It Happens to You came from a documentary that no one saw and most had never even heard of (right now, I can't even remember the name). And that has, historically, mattered in this category. I remember, many years ago, 1972, most of us thought that Ben -- a minor hit for not-quite-yet-superstar Michael Jackson -- would be the default winner, despite it coming from a lightly-attended horror film (sequel to the bigger hit Willard). But The Morning After triumphed instead, presumably because it was from the widely-seen and much-nominated The Poseidon Adventure. Over the decades since, it's been very hard for even a highly-regarded song to win unless it came from a film that voters saw. I'm not saying the film has to be a full-on blockbuster, but it has to be at least part of the conversation -- Once, for instance, wasn't a top earner, but its huge push from critics helped Falling Slowly pull out a win. The only song from a true flop movie I can recall over those years was I Just Called to Say I Love You...but there, you had a genuine luminary in Stevie Wonder, and a song that had got to number one on the charts. Gaga's song had nothing like that going for it; in retrospect, it seemed logical for a song from a $200 million domestic grosser to top it.

What does that tell us for this year? Well, for starters, that Diane Warren should prepare to go home empty-handed again, since Marshall was a box-office dud (a bit of a shame -- not that the movie's terribly special, but it does offer a truly charismatic Chadwick Boseman performance). Warren's biggest problem is her tendency toward the bland and banal, but at least in her early years she was associated with more prominent films. Now, she's strictly filler. I should add that this song is given a rousing rendition at the end of the film (much as Gaga provided two years ago), but, by then, the few who even bother to watch the film will likely have pressed Stop.

Mudbound pretty much maxed out on nominations (unless you took it seriously as a best picture prospect), so Mighty River can't be ruled out, especially in tandem with Blige's acting nod. I think the song is respectable, though a bit shrug-worthy -- not quite sure why she got cited this time and not for the more widely-heard/similar song in The Help.

On BJ's warning, I've stayed away from The Greatest Showman, but I watched what was available of This Is Me on YouTube, and...I don't know what some of you are hearing. I think both of this songwriting team's songs from last year were infinitely superior to this effort. This Is Me reminds me of those Disney cartoon power ballads, all of which are utterly bland/hard to distinguish from one another, and all seem like they could double as gay coming-out anthems. I don't find the Globe win much of an argument in support of an Oscar repeat -- there've been occasional Globe/Oscar matches, usually when the choice was obvious (Skyfall, City of Stars), but just as often they disagree (the Globes gave Diane Warren a win!) or Oscar omits the Globe winner entirely. The main thing this song has going for it would be the astonishing gross the film has racked up...though that's a bit offset by the film's failure to score any other nods. (It seemed a natural for production design or at least costumes.) I may be having a blind spot here, but I don't think the song is as strong an entry as many seem to.

In fact, before I began reading Internet commentary, I thought of this as basically a two-way race, between Remember Me and The Mystery of Love. The former seemed to me the logical favorite: a tune with an easy-to-remember hook, well-and-emotionally-used within the narrative of yet another hit animated film. (BJ is right to note how many song Oscars that's accounted for in the past three decades -- though it might be noted that the 1989-99 years account for 7 of the 10 winners.) And I'd argue the song, while simple, doesn't feel like it came off an assembly-line -- there's enough freshness to it that, were it to win, I wouldn't feel like it was in the class of Colors of the Wind or You'll Be in My Heart.

But the Mystery of Love is my favorite of the bunch. It's the one nominee -- well, maybe one of two; include Mighty River -- that feels like it comes from a modern place, rather than Tin Pan Alley on life-support. I think that "stand out from the pack" quality might help it. The song's handicap would, of course, be that its source film Call Me by Your Name hasn't been as widely seen as Coco or Greatest Showman. But this is where Call Me by Your Name's status as best picture/actor/screenplay contender will come in handy. Conscientious voters will have to watch it, to vote honorably in those major categories, so they'll hear the song in context and, perhaps, remember it more than some of the others. I think if you give the song an equal shot, it has a chance of winning.

I feel like the smart bet is still Remember Me, but I'll probably be weighing this one right to the end.

[Greg]

This may well be the most thoroughly up-in-the-air category of them all this year -- I could see this prize going in just about any direction.

Other than the usually completely up-in-the-air Foreign Film, Documentary, and Short Subject categories, I think Original Screenplay is the most up-in-the-air category this year.

[Okri]

While "Remember Me" is staggeringly powerful within the film, the song itself seems kinda.. wan? It barely lasts over a minute (the flashback version or the climactic scene). Has there been a shorter song to win (1:49 seconds, if you go by the Bratt version - though the Miguel credit version is longer, it also feels like a desecration).

Not gonna lie, "This is Me" is irritatingly catchy.

'Mystery of Love" is by far my favourite.

[Greg]

"This Is Me" has become the self-empowerment anthem of what has become a surprisingly (and to me, unfathomably) successful hit film. . . On the con side. . . the film is truly terrible. . .

I have a theory that when an Original Song nominee is the only nomination for a film, that the film itself has little impact on whether the song wins; because, many voting members decide there is no need to watch the screener of the movie, that it sufficient to vote after only listening to the song on YouTube.