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Few things are more tiresome than hearing someone proclaim: “Things aren't what they used to be.”
But in the case of the Academy Award for best original song in a motion picture, the sentiment happens to be true. Since the category made its debut in 1934, winners such as Moon River, Over the Rainbow, The Shadow of Your Smile, Days of Wine and Roses , White Chr istmas and Secret Love have been canonized as masterpieces of song craft, embraced by millions as touchstones for the films in which they appear. Unforgettable — and hummable — is what they are.
Yet all these tunes date back years, even decades. It's Hard Out Here for a Pim p by Three 6 Mafia, from Hustle & Flow, was named the top Oscar song last year, but it's a safe bet it won't supplant the 1955 topper Love is a Many-Splendored Thing at weddings this June, no matter how deathless its lyric about “niggaz hatin' on me cuz I got the hoes on the tray” may be. Ditto “There's vomit on his sweater already/Mom's spaghetti,” from the 2002 award-winner Lose Yourself by rapper Eminem.
In short, we're a long way from finding that rainbow around the bend with our huckleberry friend. The Academy Awards' best original song category has fallen on hard times in the last 15 years, embracing ditties destined to fade from memory mere seconds after they're been heard (can anyone hum Into the West, the 2003 winner?) instead of enduring for the ages. And when they're not forgettable, they're unbearable — bathetic anthems for the American Idol generation like My Heart Will Go On (from Titanic) and Y ou Must Love Me (Evita).
The animated film Cars scored one of its two Oscar nominations in the original song category. It was nominated for the song Our Town, with music and lyrics by Randy Newman.
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Any hopes that the this year's song joust would be a step up from 2006's dismal showing, when only three songs — It's Hard Out Here for a Pim p , Travelin' Thru (from the spelling-challenged Transamerica) and In the Deep ( Crash) — made the short list, were dashed when the nominees were announced Jan. 23. Yes, five songs will be dutifully performed at the Feb. 25 Oscar ceremony — but for only the third time in the awards' history, three are from the same movie, Dreamgirls.
The remaining two are from a kiddie flick ( Car s) and, for the first time in Academy history, from a documentary ( A n Inconvenient Truth, with Melissa Etheridge delivering a stadium-rock tub-thumper called I Need to Wake Up) . The Cars nominee is entirely predictable, as an astonishing nine statuettes have gone to songs from animated films or cartoon-like features (1990's Dick Tracy) since 1989, whereas in the first 50-plus years of the song category, only one song from an animation feature took top honours: this was in 1940 and it was When You Wish Upon a Star from Pinocchio.
The paucity of recent contenders isn't due to a lack of tunes. A total of 56 songs, 14 more than in 2006, were presented for Oscar consideration this year. But the songwriters and composers who choose the nominees are required to use a system that grades each song from six to 10. Only those songs with an average of 8.25 are considered nominated, whereupon all 6,000 Academy members cast the deciding vote.
The results, according to Johnny Mandel, have been “dreadful.” And he should know. At 81, he's written hundreds of arrangements and scores and songs for all sorts of projects. It was Mandel who arranged Michael Jackson's She's Out of My Life as well as the lion's share of Natalie Cole's U nforgettable project. It was a Mandel composition, The Shadow of Your Smile from The Sandpiper, that took the 1965 Oscar song trophy.
But Mandel “quit doing films by the end of the eighties because it wasn't any fun any more.”
Through the 1930s and into the 1960s, it was common for Hollywood studios to have their own music departments with their own stables of songwriters and composers, Mandel explained this week from his home in Los Angeles. As a result, there was close collaboration among the director, songwriter and composer in shaping the musical underpinnings of a movie.
Now “the song has nothing to do with the score,” he said. It's the music supervisor who, in the last 15 years, has come to dominate the sound of music in film — or, as Mandel likes to say, “a person who really gets in the way of the composer.” Often associated with a music publisher, talent agency or artists management group, the music supervisor “synchronizes” the songs he or she has access to with the budget, tone and creative aspirations of a particular film. Unsurprisingly, most of these songs “are reflective of the pop charts, and the pop charts are not songs,” Mandel opined. “They're something else — but they make a lot of money ... it's garbage in, garbage out, is what you come down to.”
Another reason for the decline of the Oscar-winning theme song, or at least its inability to worm its way into the consciousness of millions, has been the demise of Top 40 radio. From the 1950s into the 1980s, it was common for the Oscar-winning song to find itself high on the charts and cheek-by-jowl on radio play lists with recordings by acts as varied as the Beatles, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, the Paul Mauriat Orchestra, Frankie Laine, Allan Sherman and Frank Sinatra. Indeed, in 1964-1965, four of the five Oscar-nominated songs — Chim Chim Cher-ee, Dear Heart, Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte and My Kind of Town — were released as singles and all of them broke into the Top 40.
“Nobody hears a spectrum any more,” Mandel observed. “The advent of format radio has locked certain listeners in, but it's locked all the other ones out ... In the old days, before the format era, you could scan across the dial, and you'd get the ball game and on the same station you'd get the symphony or you'd get the bands playing from different places and you'd hear the pop tunes on the hit parade. Now it's become very insular. Just look at the iPod. There's no chance of hearing anything else; you just hear your own thing.”
Indeed, when Canada's Ron Sexsmith, one of the most highly regarded of contemporary tunesmiths, was asked to comment on the trajectory of the Oscar-nominated song for this article, his publicist declined on his behalf. “Ron does not feel comfortable talking about this as he really feels he should be familiar with the current songs that are nominated,” she said. “He does not feel he is familiar with the nominated songs.”
For Gene Lees, “the decline of songs, in film or out of it, is culturally ominous.” The Hamilton-born author, songwriter, lyricist and vocalist has collaborated with many famous musicians in his 79 years, including Antonio Carlos Jobim, Bill Evans and multiple Oscar nominees Lalo Schifrin and Hugo Friedhofer. It's “ominous because popular music, which is learned by rote by the young, shapes our speech and writing, probably even more than our school system. You need only listen to the level of language of television news-blondes to get a feel for what has happened.”
Both Lees, who now lives in California, and Mandel think it's highly unlikely the situation will improve. “The 1930s and 1940s was a golden era of movie songs written by schooled musicians like Jerome Kern, Cole Porter and George Gershwin,” Lees noted. It was a time when “good music was popular music. and popular music was good.” Now “you get songs by illiterates, and when the younger actors and directors and executives have grown up on trash, you can't expect them to know the difference between good music and garbage.”
Earlier this month, Daily Variety reported that Viacom Inc., the parent of Paramount Pictures, the MTV networks and, until last year, Famous Players theatres in Canada, is looking to sell its music publishing division Famous Music Corp. Founded in 1928 at the start of the talkies era, Famous reportedly has a catalogue of 125,000 copyrights. But to the amused consternation of critic and author Leonard Maltin, when Variety cited the catalogue, it referred only to songs by Shakira, Daniel Powter, Eminem and Modest Mouse — not, Maltin snorted, those songs by “Rodgers and Hart, Frank Loesser, Hoagy Carmichael [and] Victor Young [which] have lasted as much as 75 years.”
But sometimes you can't keep a good song down. The 2006 film Last Holiday with Queen Latifah and the 2003 Kate Hudson vehicle How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days both used the same tune at crucial points in their narratives. The song? It was Isn't It Romantic?, written by Rodgers and Hart expressly for the 1932 Paramount production Love Me Tonight.
