Every year around this time, I like to revisit all the past winners of my favourite Oscar: Best Original Song. This works out very well for me, because it’s an interesting retread of the changing trends not only in musical history, but in the tastes and values of the Academy over the past ninety years*. It also takes far less long than watching every Best Picture winner, or every winner of any category; with ninety winners to date, the full playlist is less than six hours long. Even the youngest Oscars category, Best Animated Feature, would take about a day and a half non-stop to watch in full.
Anyway, when you listen to ninety-odd songs in chronological order like that, year after year, you can’t help but start to notice some patterns. Well, I can’t, anyway, and now that I’ve noticed them I’d like to share with them you, too. You see, you can easily divide these songs into eras, each lasting around a decade or two.
1. The Great American Songbook: 1934-1959
In this era, you’ll see the same songwriters coming up over and over: Harry Warren, Jerome Kern, Harold Arlen, Irving Berlin, Jimmy Van Heusen, Sammy Cahn, Evans & Livingston, Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein. Come 1960, and with the sole exception of Van Heusen and Cahn’s “Call Me Irresponsible”, none of these guys ever troubled the Oscars any more, as if in acknowledgment that the 1960s would bring a seismic shift in popular music; the Songbook era was over.
2. The Sophisticated Era: 1960-1969
With the the composers who dominated the 1930s, 40s and 50s dead, retired or banished to irrelevance, a new generation of composers emerged. While the pop charts were being revolutionised by The Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Beach Boys, Motown, Phil Spector, et cetera, et cetera, the more conservative Song category continued to be won by songs in the sophisticated, smooth jazz vocal genre for most of the 60s, but new and exciting composers made themselves heard, primarily Henry Mancini who, with lyricist Johnny Mercer, managed two consecutive wins (“Moon River”, “Days of Wine and Roses”). The Greek Manos Hatzidakis (“Never On Sunday”) became the first non-American to win the award in its 27-year history, followed later by the English John Barry and Don Black (“Born Free”), who were jointly and separately involved in most of the Bond themes for over thirty years, from “Goldfinger” through “The World is Not Enough”; the English music-hall and theatre veteran Leslie Bricusse; and the tireless French composer Michel Legrand. The occasionally-cloth-eared Academy failed to nominate the themes for The Beatles’ Hard Days Night or Help!, but rock made a belated impact on Oscars history in 1968, with The Thomas Crown Affair‘s “Windmills of Your Mind”. It wasn’t exactly authentic, but it undeniably bore the influence of the psychedelic rock and baroque-pop movements that had boomed in 1966-7. Bacharach and David, the most sophisticated of sophisticates, kept the streak going with the country-rock-tinged “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head”; it’s easy to hear strains of Gram Parsons, Harry Nilsson, and the songs Jimmy Webb wrote for Glen Campbell.
3. Sucking in the 70s: 1970-1979
Pop music had already penetrated the Oscars in the late 1960s, and without exception the winners in the 1970s and, for that matter, most of the 1980s, came from a pop paradigm rather than the Broadway/Great American Songbook idiom that had previously dominated the Oscars. This was not, initially, a good thing, for almost every 70s winner is the sort of ghastly soft-rock ballad that reminds you exactly why young people like to listen to punk, metal and gangsta rap. Some of these songs have reasonably talented composers behind them – Marvin Hamlisch, David Shire, Bread – but the only ones I’d ever listen to for pleasure are Isaac Hayes’ “Theme from Shaft”** and possibly, just possibly, “Last Dance” as made famous by Donna Summer, uncoincidentally the two winners that decade that eschew soft-rock balladry for funk and disco.
4. Disco Pop: 1980-1988
The 1980s were, for the most part, a curious decade in terms of Oscar-winning songs, for most of these just sound like typical synth-driven pop music of the era. While “Fame” is obviously associated with its eponymous parent film, and Top Gun is probably famous enough that “Take My Breath Away” is popularly recognised as “love theme from Top Gun”, I suspect that many of these songs are better-known from radio play than as movie theme tunes. Aren’t “I Just Called to Say I Love You” and “Say You, Say Me” simply mega-hits from Stevie Wonder and Lionel Ritchie, respectively? They’re from movies? Which ones?
5. The Disney years: 1989-1999
If you’re around my age, it’s possible that you don’t entirely appreciate how big a deal the Disney Renaissance was, from the studio’s artistic revitalisation with The Little Mermaid, to a rare Best Picture nomination for Beauty & the Beast, to the box-office mega-success of The Lion King. Of the 11 Original Song nominees in this era, 6 went to Disney films (The Little Mermaid, Beauty & the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Pocahontas, Tarzan), with the only non-Disney winners being The Prince of Egypt – clearly modelled on the Disney house style – a couple of West End/Broadway stalwarts (Stephen Sondheim and Andrew Lloyd Webber, incidentally both writing songs for Madonna to sing), the world-conquering “My Heart Will Go On”, from Titanic, and the only oddball winner of the decade – incidentally, one of my favourite Oscar-winning songs – Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia”, which would have fit in better in the poppy 80s.
Incidentally, while the Disney films of this era deserved, on the whole, to win, often the specific songs that won didn’t, with the Academy’s preference for dismal ballads harking back to the 70s. The era started strong with the infectious, Caribbean-inflected “Under the Sea”, but “Beauty and the Beast” winning over “Be Our Guest” was a sign of things to come. I like “A Whole New World” a lot, and it certainly stands on its own as a song better than “Prince Ali” or “You Ain’t Never Had a Friend Like Me”, but ask anyone to name a song from The Lion King, and you’ll probably get an ear-blasting “Aaaaaaaah, zipenyaaaaaaa…” If not that, it might be the Michael Jackson-esque “Just Can’t Wait to Be King”, the life-affirming “Hakuna Matata” or even the sinister “Be Prepared”. I don’t think anyone really likes “Can You Feel the Love Tonight?”, probably not even Sir Elton himself. The same goes for “Colors of the Wind”, and “You’ll Be in My Heart” has to be one of the worst songs ever to win an Oscar.
6. Anything goes: 2000-2023
As the Disney Renaissance petered out, so did any kind of consistency in what kind of song is judged “Oscar-worthy”. This millennium has so far seen wins for rock legends (Bob Dylan, T-Bone Burnett); further 1990s-style Disney wins (for Monsters, Inc., Toy Story 3, The Muppets, Frozen and Coco); hip-hop beginning to see recognition, a quarter-century or so after its invention (Eminem, Three 6 Mafia, Common, H.E.R.); Bollywood sounds (“Jai Ho!”, “Naatu Naatu”); three Bond themes winning in a row, after the Academy’s bizarre failure to give awards to classic songs like “Live and Let Die” or “Nobody Does It Better”; some more traditional Oscars fare (“Shallow”, “City of Stars”), and most recently, the return of that aforementioned preference for dreary ballads, with Billie Eilish’s forgettable “What Was I Made For?” beating Mark Ronson’s instant camp classic “I’m Just Ken” (both from Barbie).
And there you are! 90 songs, including many of the best-known songs in the world, boiled down into six simple eras. Perhaps we’ll enter a new era soon. I hope so, but they’re probably difficult to identify until after they’re over.
*This year sees the 96th Academy Awards, but the song category didn’t exist until 1934.
**No instrumental has ever won, and I’m pretty sure they’re not eligible. But “Theme from Shaft” comes very close to being an instrumental.
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