The Oscars give us a good reason to hate them a little more every year, and when it comes to music you couldn’t go for more conventional, more guarded and predictable than their choices!
Mid December, the Academy Awards had revealed a shortlist for its Best Original Song category, and it looked more promising than ever, as some unexpected artists had made the list among the 75 possible nominees. There were in particular Arcade Fire’s ‘Abraham’s Daughter’ from ‘The Hunter Games’, Fiona Apple’s ‘Dull Tool’ from ‘This Is 40’, The Black Keys’ ‘The Baddest Man Alive’ from ‘The Man With the Iron Fists’, Karen O’s ‘Strange Love’ from ‘Frankenweenie’, Mumford and Sons’ ‘Learn Me Right’ from ‘Brave’ and even Rick Ross’ ‘100 Black Coffins’ from ‘Django Unchained’ (there were actually three songs from that Tarantino’s movie!)
But of course, none of them figure in the list of the final nominees which was revealed a few days ago! Instead, the five nominated tracks for Best Original Song are Norah Jones’ ‘Everybody Needs a Best Friend’ from ‘Ted’, Scarlett Johansson’s ‘Before My Time’ from ‘Chasing Ice’, Hugh Jackman’s ‘Suddenly’ from ‘Les Misérables’, ‘Pi's Lullaby’ from ‘Life of Pi’, and of course Adele's ‘Skyfall’ from ‘Skyfall’.
I bet nobody, who hasn’t seen these movies, has even heard about these songs beside the Adele’s one… What-a-joke.
I tried to listen to them, and it was painful. The Norah Jones’ track is a classic old-fashioned jazzy Hollywood-feel-good one, some extremely groundbreaking stuff that old white people love to death, whereas the Scarlett Johansson-sung track is one slow icy-bore lullaby, you have already forgotten as soon as you have started listening to it. I thought I would fall asleep while trying to listen to that Pi song, honestly who gives a fuck about such soporific Bollywood vacuity? And honestly Hugh Jackman’s song from ‘Les Misérables’ isn’t better, it’s very watery, it goes nowhere and it is just one of these old-Hollywood-people pleasers.
Of course, none of these nominations matter since Adele is gonna win with her classic-James-Bond spoof, and that says a lot about these nominations! ‘Skyfall’ sounds old before Adele reaches the second note, but she is gonna perform the song as her first apparition since her baby birth and this is the stuff Oscars are made of.