Oscar nominees speak out on ‘disrespectful’ snub of Best Original Song performances
For the ninth year, the Songwriters Hall of Fame has gathered the Oscar nominees for Best Original Song for a special virtual discussion. The panel, which premiered online today, featured Abraham Alexander and Adrian Quesada (“Like a Bird” from Sing Sing), Brandi Carlile (“Never Too Late” from Elton John: Never Too Late), Clément Ducol and Camille (“El Mal” and “Mi Camino” from Emilia Pérez), and Diane Warren (“The Journey” from The Six Triple Eight), with Songwriters Hall of Famers Nile Rodgers and Paul Williams (also an Oscar winner for Best Song) moderating the conversation. Watch it here.
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“I was introduced to Elton’s music through a book report when I was 11 years old and fell head over heels with Elton John as a person before I even heard any of his music,” said Carlile. “So when I say I’m a fan, it’s fundamental. I never would’ve written a song or played an instrument without Elton John and Bernie Taupin.” Now she’s nominated for an Oscar for penning “Never Too Late” from the Elton John biographical doc of the same name. And she’s nominated with John and Taupin, along with Andrew Watt. “I was really inspired by [the film]. When I got to the end of it, I thought, ‘He’s so f—king tough.’ That’s the thing I wish more people knew about Elton John. He is an iron man, baby.”
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Alexander explained how he and Quesada had a very specific vision for “Like a Bird.” “We thought that it was important to personify the emotion that we were seeing and the emotion that we were feeling, and we came up with the idea of a bird,” Alexander said. “The fact that birds were created to fly, and to feel wind underneath their wings and to touch the skies. And I think the same goes for human beings and humans were created to dream and to have purpose, meaning and feel love. When you deny a bird from flying, you’re denying it from being precisely what he was created for. And when you incarcerate human beings and remove them from being humanized, you’re removing them from the God-given thing that they were created for.”
Quesada added, “We didn’t really have a lot of time for it. We probably had a couple of days to get it together and we were never in the same room. He was going into the studio at 2 in the morning, sending me the files overnight, and I’d send him stuff back. It was that kind of thing. And up until the last minute, the moment that [director Greg Kwedar] and producer Monique came to my studio to watch it sync up with the film, I was literally editing it. I mean, until the second I hit play in front of them, I was working on it. So it had this really divine kind of serendipitous way that it all just came together and fit like a glove.”
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Warren is a veteran of the Oscars and of the SHOF Oscar nominees panel. She has been nominated by the Academy for the last eight years in a row and 16 times total. She has yet to win a statuette competitively, but in 2022 she became the first songwriter ever to receive an Honorary Oscar. Now she’s up for “The Journey,” which she approached differently from her usual songs for motion pictures. “My friend Keri Selig, she’s a friend of mine that I’ve known for 20 years, … she goes, ‘I need to talk to you about this movie I’m producing.'” So she showed Warren a sizzle reel of The Six Triple Eight and walked her through the rest. “I’ve never written a song that way. Usually, I’ll get a script or I’ll see a rough cut of the movie. I saw the movie in my mind and the next day. I sat at my keyboards and just played that chord progression. That chorus just came, literally as I was playing, I wrote that whole chorus. That usually doesn’t happen.” The end result was “one of my favorite, favorite, favorite songs I ever wrote in my life.”
Camille and Ducol could relate to Warren’s lyrics about embarking on a long journey. “We spent two years, I mean, not in a row, but with several work sessions, two years working on the songs, along with the script being written,” Camille revealed. “We rewrote. Back and forth with each scene. We thought, ‘Is it a song? Is there a song?’ And we would progress like that from the beginning to the end of the movie. So that took two years, and then the shooting took place, and then we rewrote the score.” Of “El Mal” in particular, Ducol remembered, “This is actually the song that gave us the most trouble to write because the subject matter is so harsh. … We were between cynicism, irony, distance, lyricism. We made six or seven different songs until we finally found the tone with this sort of rock opera rap.”
But those songs won’t be performed at the Oscars, according to the Academy’s latest plans. “I feel really sad because I don’t know if I’ll ever get a chance to perform on the Oscars again,” Carlile commented. “I can’t fathom it, especially with Elton John. When I first found Elton John, it was in the ’90s, and he was winning an Oscar for The Lion King, and I couldn’t believe it. I thought, ‘One day when I grow up, if I could get the right clothes, I could go to his Oscar party.’ So to have the opportunity to perform with Elton John on the Oscars is a hard thing to not have manifest.”
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“I think it’s extremely disrespectful to all the song nominees,” Warren argued. “In 2021 they did all the songs in a pre-show, which no one kind of knew was on, and it wasn’t shown outside of America. And there were really beautiful performances. … People really do love music. Music is important to films. Listen to a movie without music and see what you feel. Songs are important. We’ve all written songs that are really integral to the movies they’re in. And to me, it’s unfair to both the nominees and the audience out there to not be able to hear them.”
For Camille, “music is entertainment and music is also a way to be in communion with the people.” Warren interjects that these songs are uniquely meaningful, reflecting “what we’re going through right now. Music is a healer. And to take that out of this, it’s wrong.” Alexander contributed, “If they want to highlight people’s pain and highlight what they’ve lost, then let’s do that with grace, and let’s do that with love and kindness,” but he ultimately agreed with Warren that “music is healing and music can bring people together. Music can explain what people have gone through, and give them hope, and give them a sense of relief — give them a sense of embrace.”
The Society of Composers and Lyricists even sent a letter to the Academy leadership asking them to restore the songs to the telecast. “I just think everybody was nominated by our amazing peers in the music branch, and it’s a big honor,” said Warren. “I’m not taking that away. The fact that we got nominated, we already won. It’s amazing. But you just want the songs to be heard, especially at a time like this.”
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