Oscars 2024: How Best Original Song nominee Diane Warren became the queen of confusing Academy Award nods

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The songwriter Diane Warren has spent greater than 4 many years conjuring overwrought bangers by the bucketful – energy ballads that plead and mourn and crescendo, the type irresistible to workplace events and chintzy karaoke machines. You haven’t lived till you’ve seen Celine Dion’s “Because You Loved Me” drunkenly warbled by the most overconfident individual from HR. A handful of Warren’s biggest and best-known tracks for different artists – amongst them Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” and Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” – have additionally helped make her the most nominated songwriter in Oscar historical past to by no means win a aggressive trophy. More importantly, although, current years have turned her right into a malicious program for the weirdest motion pictures to seize a seat at the Academy Awards.

Warren has been nominated for 15 Best Original Song Oscars since 1987, every yet another chaotic than the final. For these are nominations for motion pictures that in any other case don’t actually exist. There’s her music for Four Good Days, wherein Mila Kunis shakes off crack habit. Her music for Tell It Like a Woman, a feminine empowerment anthology movie starring Cara Delevingne. For Breakthrough, a Christian fable a couple of boy who falls into an icy lake. For Racing for Agnes, about an aged widower who competes in the Boston Marathon. And, this yr, for an inspirational movie about the historical past of Cheetos known as Flamin’ Hot. Only one of these is made up, by the approach, and it’s not the Cheeto film.

Warren’s lyrics have at all times tended to circle the identical handful of themes – adversity, resilience, tortured romance, pained gazing. Toni Braxton’s “Un-Break My Heart”. Sugababes’ “Too Lost in You”. Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time”. No metaphor is secure. Warren has described love as being like a protect from a storm. That phrases are like weapons, and that they wound generally. That you possibly can attempt to withstand LeAnn Rimes and conceal from her kiss, however she is… moonlight, which you can’t battle. Or one thing. But even with the caveat of lyrical repetition, it’s wild that each one of Warren’s current Oscar-nominated songs sounds precisely the identical – full of fortune cookie aphorisms and limp motivational speechifying, as if she’s been possessed by the world’s most downbeat aerobics teacher.

“When you think that all the odds are all against you/ And you just feel like giving up, well, I won’t let you,” on “I’m Standing with You” from Breakthrough. “When you’re too run down to take another step/ I will take up the struggle,” on “I’ll Fight” from the Ruth Bader Ginsberg documentary RBG. “When you think that the mountain’s too high and the ocean’s too wide that you’ll never get through/ Some way, somehow, somehow you do,” on “Somehow You Do” from Four Good Days. Perhaps her Italian quantity “Io sì (Seen)” – from the 2020 Sophia Loren movie The Life Ahead – loved a lyrical switcheroo? Let’s throw it into Google Translate and see! “When you feel like no one understands you – I will, I will/ When you think no love can ever heal you – mine will, mine will.” Argh!

This shouldn’t be strictly Warren’s fault. Outside of the Oscar bubble, her songwriting continues to be robust. Her lyrics on a 2023 Belinda Carlisle EP show she’s nonetheless succesful of authoring hooky earworms. She has an important new monitor on Taylor Swift’s current re-release of 1989 that riffs on the bombastic melancholy of her finest work. And whereas some anti-intellectual philistines could condemn “Why Did You Do That?” from the A Star Is Born soundtrack – a music that options the immortal line “Why do you look so good in those jeans?/ Why’d you come around me with an ass like that?” – I occur to assume it’s a camp marvel.

In truth, blame for Warren’s unstoppable run of Best Song slop lies largely at the toes of the Academy. Best Original Song has for years been a bit of a zombie class – unloved, unasked for, but in addition important to the annual Oscar broadcast as an entire. Without a handful of dwell performances to interrupt the present up, we’d simply be left with extra time for acceptance speeches and advert breaks. Or, even worse, amateur-hour musical numbers shortly regretted by everybody concerned. Do you assume we’d have gotten Ariana DeBose confrontingly rhyming at bemused celebrities eventually yr’s Baftas in the event that they gave out a Best Original Song prize?

What this all means, although, is that the Best Original Song class has to exist whether or not or not any songs exist to fill it. Hollywood hasn’t helped in that regard – whereas blockbusters of the Eighties and Nineties usually made authentic theme songs integral elements of their identities (assume “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic, “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” from Dirty Dancing, or any of the large, emotive numbers from Disney’s late Twentieth-century renaissance), right this moment they’re more durable to seek out. Or even keep in mind. Last yr’s Oscars noticed Best Original Song nominations go to Top Gun: Maverick and Everything Everywhere All at Once. These have been in any other case inescapable motion pictures from 2022, however are you able to title both of their central songs?

So what does that depart to fill the relaxation of the required slots? Sludge! Tedium! The unhealthy and the boring of end-credits wailing! A nod for one thing known as “Hear My Voice” from The Trial of the Chicago 7? Stop this now! That the decision-makers of the Academy’s music department sometimes appear allergic to enjoyable solely provides to the distress right here – I stay bitter that Hugh Grant flapped and crotch-thrusted his approach by way of the shimmering Eighties bop “Pop! Goes My Heart” for 2007 romcom Music and Lyrics and but it didn’t even get a nomination.

Warren, in the meantime, has merely embraced the system because it stands: if the Oscars need sleepy ballads about folks discovering their interior power, she’ll be there together with her pen and her notepad. But contemplating the huge catalogue of treacly classics to Warren’s title, it’s disheartening to see her return to the Oscars – yr after yr – with tracks that mirror her worst lyrical instincts. She can do higher! She can write songs for motion pictures that truly exist outdoors of Oscar trivia video games! All she has to do is imagine in herself. And if she wants an inspirational ditty to get her going, I’ll have a number of at hand.