This year’s Oscar-winning song, Rocketman’s “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again,” may not be the best music Elton John and Bernie Taupin ever made, but it’s a solid improvement on some of the terrible music-like products that took statues in the aughts. Is there anyone who goes around whistling 2005’s Academy favorite, “It’s Hard out Here for a Pimp”?
And yet, as solid a piece of punchy Brit-pop as “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again” may be, why, one might ask, write a new song when John has a surfeit of certifiable hits with which to stuff the production? Why not nominate the song that provided the title to the biopic, “Rocketman”?
For an answer, we might go back to when actor Dooley Wilson, playing Humphrey Bogart’s sidekick in Casablanca, was enticed by Ingrid Bergman to sing “As Time Goes By.” The song was a hit and musically defined the film. But even though Casablanca took the prizes for best picture and best director in the 1944 Oscars, the song didn’t even get nominated. It wasn’t nominated, of course, because the award was for best original song — as in, original to the movie in which it appears. “As Time Goes By” was an old song from 1931 and was used as a sentimental oldie. It didn’t qualify.
So if you want to maximize your Oscar chances, it pays to have at least one new song in the mix, even if, as with John, there’s not enough screen time for all the old favorites. It’s not an original strategy. There was more music in the stage version of Evita than could be stuffed into a film. But Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice nevertheless penned an extra song, “You Must Love Me,” which was somehow deemed Oscar-worthy when it was featured in the film adaptation in 1996.
Sometimes, extra songs are written to provide something in an accessible style that can be used for both radio airplay and Academy bait. Take Alfie (1966), that deceptively serious comic morality play starring Michael Caine. The incidental music, including the swaggering opening, “Alfie’s Theme,” was composed and performed by jazz saxophone great Sonny Rollins. The title song by Burt Bacharach and Hal David was something of an afterword — if not an afterthought. It was sung over the closing credits. Though it is Rollins’s music that establishes the atmosphere and attitude of the film, it was Bacharach’s (admittedly excellent) pop song that the movie studio put forward for an Academy Award.
But Academy Award-winning songs are at their best not just when they are good songs performed well but when they advance the plot of the movie. Which is exactly what happened, rather astonishingly, with A Star Is Born. The film (or films of that name) has achieved the remarkable feat of being nominated for three Oscars for best original song. One might ask: How is that possible? It’s an artifact of there having been multiple remakes of the film, each starring a stellar singer. In 2018, there was the Lady Gaga version of the story, in which she sang a power ballad she helped compose, “Shallow.” Barbara Streisand delivered her take on A Star Is Born in 1976 with Kris Kristofferson and collected a statue for the treacly “Evergreen.”
But far and away, the best of the lot is Judy Garland’s yearning, aching, nearly desperate performance of “The Man That Got Away” in her 1954 version of A Star Is Born. The song, written by geniuses Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin, was so perfect and so perfectly delivered, modulating as it did from an easygoing mezzo-piano to a fortissimo heartbreak, that it defined not only the film but also Garland’s career. She used it as her stage showstopper.
Though nominated, “The Man That Got Away” didn’t win an Oscar. It lost to “Three Coins in the Fountain,” by the estimable team of Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were embarrassed by the outcome.
Eric Felten is the James Beard Award-winning author of How’s Your Drink?
