Her fight song G
After nine losses, the Susan Lucci of songwriting is gunning for glory
LENN Close is tipped to end her Oscar losing streak on Sunday with her seventh nomination: Best Actress for “The Wife.” But there’s another woman nominated this year who has played the gracious, clap-and-smile loser even more times: Diane Warren, who received her 10th Best Original Song nod for “I’ll Fight” — a defiant ballad sung by Jennifer Hudson in the Ruth Bader Ginsburg documentary “RBG.”
“I got her beat by three!” says Warren, who, while she believes that Close will finally score her first Academy Award, doesn’t think she herself stands a chance this year: “I’m a nine-time loser, about to be a 10-time loser .. . against some stiff competition.”
The stiffest of that competition comes from “Shallow” — the “AStar Is Born” duet with Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, who also cowrote it.
“I think that has a bit more of a shot than me this year,” Warren says with a laugh about “the clear frontrunner” in a field that also includes “All the Stars,” the Kendrick Lamar and SZA hit from “Black Panther.”
But she’s OKif she goes home without a gold statue. Ten nominations “is a pretty cool achievement,” says Warren. “Would it be nice to win? Yeah, it’d be fun. But then it gives me something to keep working towards.”
Warren, 62, knows how it feels to be up against an unstoppable song such as “Shallow.” In 1998, her Oscarnominated tune “How Do I Live” — sung by Trisha Yearwood in “Con Air” — was sunk by the “Titanic” smash “My Heart Will Go On,” performed by Céline Dion. The next year, her “Armageddon” song, “I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing,” crashed out too, despite being a No. 1 single for Aerosmith.
The songwriter was first shortlisted for Oscar gold in 1988, for her “Mannequin” tune “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now.” Warren — who now describes Starship’s No. 1 single as “the song about the guy f--king a mannequin” — doesn’t recall much about her first Oscar night: “I had a really horrible outfit on, that’s all I remember.”
Warren’s second Oscar nomination came in 1997, for another Dion smash, “Because You Loved Me,” from “Up Close & Personal.” “I really did think I was gonna win,” she says, “so I remember being depressed that I didn’t.”
In 2016, she also had that winning feeling for “Til It Happens to You,” a song that Warren co-wrote with Lady Gaga for “The Hunting Ground,” a documentary about sexual assault on college campuses. She truly thought it was finally her moment after “watching everybody sobbing around me” when Gaga performed the song at the Oscars with a group of sexual-assault survivors.” When the winner, Sam Smith’s “Writing’s On the Wall,” from the Bond film “Spectre,” was announced, Warren says, “‘I was like, ‘Whaaat?’”
Warren — who has her own connection to “AStar Is Born” from cowriting “Why Did You Do That?” (“the butt song,” as she calls it) with Gaga — heard “Shallow” early on and knew it was something special: “I was like, ‘Yeah. That’s gonna work.’”
Still, as she rocks the “really cool suit” she got for Sunday’s Oscars, Warren says she will, like always, be prepared with her own acceptance speech just in case: “I mean, yeah. I have my list of people to thank and stuff. When I’ve written it on pieces of paper, I just crumble them back in my pocket after I lose.”