The schlock will go on
This bleak Academy category sees greatness in ‘a muppety man’
Ah, Oscar, what is it with you and pop music?
You try so hard to be contemporary, to celebrate excellence, to promote the delicate interplay between music and film.
But no matter how stoic your determination, how noble your intentions, you always come off like an out-of-touch swinger: pot-bellied, sideburned, bedecked in gold chains, ready to party like it’s 1974.
It’s one thing to impose this suffering on viewers at your annual TV train wreck — yikes, I still have nightmares about Rob Lowe’s offkey duet with Snow White in a cheesy tribute to showbiz excess that, get this, prompted legal action from Walt Disney Co.
But your Best Song category — a famed repository for Hollywood schlock — is another story.
I don’t know if it’s the advancing age of your voting members or the nature of music written for the big screen, but the songs that inevitably get nominated — stuff like “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” and “My Heart Will Go On” — seethe with bombastic mediocrity.
They’re not bad songs, necessarily, just overblown, monotonous and maddeningly simplistic.
It’s ironic, of course, that while the Oscars have come under fire for favouring art-house fare over blockbusters in the major film categories, Best Song nominees veer defiantly — some would say foolishly — in the opposite direction.
Recognizing the problem in 2009, the Academy took action to stem the tide of schlock, imposing stringent standards to weed out the riffraff and promote only those songs deemed artistically superior.
Did it work? Yes and no. It did reduce the number of songs, with only two making the cut this year for the first time in Oscar history, so props for that.
But, confound it, with the alliterative kiddie film jingles “Man or Muppet” (from The Muppets) and “Real in Rio” (from Rio), the kitsch element seeped through yet again. “Am I a man or am I a muppet?” croons Jason Segel on the former, cited by some as a touching ode to selfhood. “If I’m a muppet, then I’m a very manly muppet.”
Ah yes. If only Cole Porter, nominated in 1936, was alive today.
Then there’s the percolating “Real in Rio,” co-written by Brazilian legend Sergio Mendes, which sounds like something you’d hear playing in the background at a South American buffet.
It wasn’t always this way. In Oscar’s early years, which happened to coincide with the golden age of songwriting, tunes like “The Way You Look Tonight,” “That Old Black Magic” and “Mona Lisa” were par for the course, timeless classics by celebrated songwriters that would never go out of style.
But sometime around the “now generation” of the ’60s, when Doctor Dolittle’s “Talk to the Animals” competed for top honours against The Jungle Book’s “Bare Necessities” (the former won), things started running off the rails.
There were exceptions, of course: Isaac Hayes’ “Theme from Shaft” was one of the few genuinely cool winners, in ’71, and Eminem’s “Lose Yourself” gave Oscar a fleeting dose of relevance in 2002.
But for every “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” (Three 6 Mafia’s unlikely ’05 winner), there were a dozen middlebrow ballads like “The Way We Were,” “You Light Up My Life” and “Say You, Say Me.”
If you scan the nominees list, in fact, it’s clear the songwriting ranks are a pretty closed shop, with a slim contingent of unrepentant schlockmeisters cropping up over and over: Carole Bayer Sager, Marvin Hamlisch, David Foster, Diane Warren, Bryan Adams, Elton John and Phil Collins. The arrival of critical darling Randy Newman in the ’80s sparked hopes of a new direction, until the respected music satirist revealed an unexpectedly sappy side with kiddie hits for the Toy Story franchise, part of a flood of Disney winners that turned the Best Song category into a sort of musical daycare. Academy tinkering notwithstanding, it’s been a pretty bleak 84 years. “I’m a man, I’m a muppet,” croons Segel on this year’s projected frontrunner. “I’m a muppet of a man, I’m a muppety man, that’s what I am.” Somewhere, as the Academy scratches its head and prepares to revise its regulations yet again, Irving Berlin and Johnny Mercer are rolling in their graves. Joel Rubinoff writes about pop culture for the Waterloo Region Record. Email him at jrubinoff@therecord.com