Celine Dion & Andrea Bocelli – “The Prayer” from “Quest For Camelot” (1999)
Celine Dion‘s “My Heart Will Go On” is one of the best known Original Song winners in history, but what’s more easily forgotten is that she was back there the next year, for Warner Bros.‘ mega-flop animation “Quest For Camelot.” “The Prayer” has apparently become a bit of a Dion staple (it’s popular at both Christmas and funerals, which, uh, at least suggests it’s versatile), but the performance at the Oscars, a duet with Andrea Bocelli, is unspeakably dull. In fact, it’s so boring that we … Sorry, nodded off for a minute there. The performance sounds like two (very mediocre) different songs being sung at each other, rather than together, and Dion and Bocelli display not even an iota of chemistry together.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGAd_iwPQ-A
“We Saw Your Boobs” – Seth MacFarlane (2013)
The daring choice of Seth MacFarlane to host last year’s ceremony worried those of us who aren’t fans of his work on “Family Guy” and “Ted” and elsewhere, but a strong ‘SNL‘ hosting gig suggested that he could turn out do a pretty good job. And then came his opening number, the already-legendary “We Saw Your Boobs.” One of multiple excuses for MacFarlane to entertain his rat-pack fantasies, and dressed up as a confusing meta-thing with William Shatner as Captain Kirk that suggested it as a sort of worst-case scenario, it’s a perfectly pleasant melody, but pretty grim otherwise. For all the quote-marks MacFarlane tries to put around it, it’s objectifying, fratty and in places, incredibly questionable—hey, Jodie Foster, we saw your boobs in “The Accused,” because that’s what rape scenes are good for, enabling us to see your boobs! It couldn’t have been a worse note to start the evening on, and it says something that, while the Academy have made the bulk of Oscar openings available on YouTube, MacFarlane’s isn’t officially on there.
Rob Lowe & Snow White (1989)
Well, we were hardly going to forget this one, were we? It’s the motherload of ill-judged, disastrous Oscar musical numbers, and one that’s haunted AMPAS ever since. Poor, fresh-off-the-bus actress Eileen Bowman was selected by “Grease” producer Allen Carr (whose career was pretty much ended by the day after) to play Snow White—despite no approval from Disney, who went on to sue. The poor girl enters the theater following a parade of cardboard stars, goes to a reenactment of the Coconut Grove full of faded stars like Buddy Rogers, Tony Martin and Vincent Price, before Rob Lowe joins the stage to join her in a reedy-voiced duet of “Proud Mary.” It’s legitimately staggering, and so unbelievably awkward that it’s basically unwatchable. It wasn’t received any better on the night—legends including Paul Newman, Billy Wilder and Gregory Peck wrote an open letter calling it “an embarrassment to both the Academy and the entire motion picture industry.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rC5mEvydSiQ
Also Worth Mentioning: Among the other dodgy ones, there were some pretty dire attempts at two songs from “The Little Mermaid,” Aerosmith‘s “Armageddon” ballad “Don’t Wanna Miss A Thing,” and Phil Collins performing his Oscar-winning song from “Tarzan.”
Do you have a favorite or a performance you wish you could scrub from your memory? Let us know in the comments section.
