Hey, want to stump your friends with a new version of “Name That Tune”? Ask them to hum a few bars of any of this year’s Oscar nominees for best song. Chances are they won’t even be able to fake it.
The most popular of the bunch, Counting Crows’ “Accidentally in Love” from “Shrek 2,” peaked at No. 39 on Billboard’s Hot 100 last fall.
The rest–“Al Otro Lado del Rio” from “The Motorcycle Diaries,” “Believe” from “The Polar Express,” “Learn To Be Lonely” from “The Phantom of the Opera” and “Look to Your Path (Vois Sur Ton Chemin)” from “The Chorus”–rarely got heard outside the darkened confines of the multiplex.
And if the song played over the closing credits, you were probably too busy checking your cell phone messages to have noticed anyway.
To add award-show insult to lack-of-airplay injury, one of the year’s most notable musical collaborations–Mick Jagger and Dave Stewart’s Golden Globe-winning “Old Habits Die Hard” from “Alfie”–went unrecognized. No surprise there, since even that wasn’t a hit on the radio.
So if you sense old-man Oscar getting ever more willful and weird in his song choices every year, you’re right … sort of.
Usually, there’s at least one across-the-board, even-your-parents’-dentist-knows-it smash on the list. Two years ago, it was Eminem’s statue-grabbing “Lose Yourself,” from “8 Mile.” And even the most pop-culturally confounded can’t scrub the chorus of 1998 nominee “I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing” (from “Armageddon”) or 1997 winner “My Heart Will Go On” (“Titanic”) out of their brains.
Yet the hits and “American Idol” fodder are always equaled, if not outnumbered, by tunes that only the songwriter’s family remembers–and even they might require some prodding.
Because the year of “My Heart Will Go On” was also the year of “Journey to the Past” from “Anastasia.” And “I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing” did battle with “A Soft Place To Fall” from “The Horse Whisperer.” Whisper a few bars of that.
We could use a few more years like 1984, when every song was on our radios and our lips: Phil Collins’ “Against All Odds,” Kenny Loggins’ “Footloose,” Ray Parker Jr.’s “Ghostbusters,” Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called To Say I Love You” from “The Lady in Red” and Deniece Williams’ “Let’s Hear It for the Boy” from “Footloose.”
Your friends can definitely do more than hum a few bars of these–though they may not want to admit it.