In the week running up to tomorrow Oscar’s ceremony, we’ve looked at various aspects of Academy Award mania, from the best, and the worst, Best Picture winners, to the directors who went unrecognized, to our final predictions. But there’s one final element of Oscar ceremonies themselves that we wanted to highlight: the musical numbers.
Though musicals don’t always dominate ceremonies the way they used to back in the day, the Academy’s love for a good (or disastrous) musical moment has remained fairly consistent. And after a few years off, as Best Original Song performances were ignored, they’re back in force. And this year will see, for the first time in some years, all four Original Song nominees performed, with U2, Karen O, Idina Menzel and Pharrell Williams taking the stage.
That means that right now, LA is full of stressed-out dancers desperately trying to learn their interpretative dance moves to a tossed-off Bono number, so to lessen their pain, and to prepare you for your own ahead of Sunday’s ceremony, we’ve picked out five great Oscar musical numbers from previous years, and five terrible ones. We’re not making any claims to being definitive—there’s an 85-year history here, and not all that much of it is available (legend has it that the 1987 ceremony began with Telly Savalas, Pat Morita and Dom DeLuise singing “Fugue For Tinhorns” from “Guys and Dolls,” but it’s somehow defied the Internet and never made its way online). But that’s not to besmirch the quality, or lack of it, that you’ll find in the potted history below. Take a look, and speak up for your own favorites, or anti-favorites, in the comments section.
5 Great Ones
Bjork – “I’ve Seen It All” – from “Dancer In The Dark” (2001)
The ceremony can do razzle-dazzle well, but with the right song and performer, sometimes all you need is an empty stage. And, sometimes, a dress that looks like a swan. That a Lars von Trier film broke into the category that mostly celebrates mediocrity is sort of remarkable, and his bleak, yet joyful musical “Dancer In The Dark” (which might remain his best film) is certainly an atypical picture for the category, just as Bjork‘s song “I’ve Seen It All” was equally out of place. But the Icelandic chanteuse is a world-class live performer, and complete with her bird-themed outfit, she owns the stage, and probably freaked out the elderly Academy members while she was at it. If she’d performed the full duet with Peter Stormare, as in the film (or Thom Yorke, as it was on record), it would have been ever better, but even so, it’s not a moment we’ll ever forget.
Elliott Smith – “Miss Misery” – from “Good Will Hunting” (1998)
Another unlikely performer, and another (rightly) stripped down set, this is one of the more emotionally potent and memorable Original Song performances in living memory. Singer-songwriter Elliott Smith contributed a number of tracks to the “Good Will Hunting” soundtrack, but it’s the lovely “Miss Misery” that was the specially-composed one, and which in a year dominated by Celine Dion and a ballad from “Con Air,” proved to be a real standout. Smith was initially reluctant to perform, but when told that another artist would cover the tune it if he turned down, he eventually acquiesced. Smith later commented, “I enjoy performing almost as much as I enjoy making up songs in the first place. But the Oscars was a very strange show, where the set was only one song cut down to less than two minutes, and the audience was a lot of people who didn’t come to hear me play. I wouldn’t want to live in that world, but it was fun to walk around on the moon for a day.”
