The rest of my Best Original Song picks are songs that feature prominently within the films’ action. That’s my favorite kind of movie song, as opposed to something slapped over the end credits.
I wanted to dedicate a day to classic songs that went on to transcend the movies for which they were written. Some of these, like today’s SOTD, I didn’t even realize were originally written for a movie.
I’m skipping Random Weekends this week (and for awhile longer, as you’ll learn soon) in order to close out February with the rest of my Best Original Song posts. Over the next five days I’ll feature some of my favorite Academy Award-winning songs.
Bruce Springsteen has been nominated for two Oscars, one for the title track of 1995’s Dead Man Walking and two years earlier for ‘Streets of Philadelphia,’ from the late Jonathan Demme’s film Philadelphia. Springsteen took home the trophy that year against a relatively weak field (which included another track from the same film, Neil Young’s ‘Philadelphia’).
THe touching ‘Remember Me’ from Pixar’s Coco rounds out the nominations in this year’s Best Original Song category. I’ve written about this song already, during a week of my favorite musical movie moments of 2017, so it’s no secret that it’s a favorite.
Earlier this week I wrote that The Greatest Showman is the only true musical nominated in this category, but I suppose one could argue that Coco earns the label. It’s certainly the closest to a musical that Pixar has come to date.
Mary J. Blige made Oscar history last month, becoming the only performer ever nominated as an actor and Best Song composer in the same year. Blige earned a Supporting Actress nod for her soulful turn in Dee Rees’ Mudbound, and co-wrote the movie’s end credits song with Raphael Saadiq and Taura Stinson.
Mudbound was one of my favorite 2017 films, and one that I bet would have fared even better in the Oscar nominations had it received a proper theatrical release and not been confined to Netflix for most of the country.
Our third Oscar-nominated song comes from the biopic Marshall, starring Black Panther as the nation’s first African-American Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall.
The song is performed by soul singer Andra Day and rapper Common, and written by Common and 9-time Best Song nominee Diane Warren. Warren has never won the statue despite her run of nominations, while Common took the prize when he was last nominated, for the song ‘Glory’ in 2015’s Selma.
