The Best Song Podcast

After many years of trying, a theme song from a James Bond movie finally broke through and received an Oscar nomination! Paul and Linda McCartney made history with "Live and Let Die," not only ushering in a new chapter for James Bond songs, but showing that rock music can be a part of Academy history two years after "Theme From Shaft" won the Academy Award. Host Jeff Commings talks more about the...

The conversation surrounding the Oscar-nominated songs from 1972 might start with the songs that were not nominated, instead of the five that made the cut. Two original songs from the hit movie Cabaret, which remains one of the oddities of Academy Award history, especially knowing how loved the movie itself was by the Academy. Host Jeff Commings gives a history of the five nominated songs, includi...

Johnny Mercer's 18th and final Oscar nomination for songwriting came for a conventional movie song that was competing for the big award alongside a song that was the equivalent of a 9.1 earthquake. Shaft featured a no-holds-barred black New York private investigator and a no-holds-barred theme song that shook up the list of five Oscar nominees from that year. Isaac Hayes, who was new to the Hollyw...

Competition was tight for the Original Song Oscar for songs released in 1970, as six of the 11 Oscar nominees had already won at least one Oscar. The five songs weren't immensely popular with the public, but they did provide some intriguing storylines as two members of a moderately popular rock and roll band wrote a conventional love ballad and used pseudonyms in case the song was a flop. Henry Ma...

Songwriters tried very, very hard to bring rock 'n' roll music into the Oscar nominees for Original Song in 1969, but the old guard strongly resisted and left off some now-classic tunes from the final list of five. Burt Bacharach and Hal David tried very hard to fight against the old ways of Hollywood, and managed to get a nomination for a classic movie song with a pop flavor. As you learn more ab...

Julie Andrews and Barbra Streisand originated two of the songs nominated for the Original Song Oscar in 1968: "Star" and "Funny Girl." The men who wrote those songs had some tough competition for the award that year, including a married couple who were making their big breakthrough with a seemingly nonsensical song that doesn't fit into any genre. Learn more on this episode with host Jeff Commings...

History was made in 1967, when Quincy Jones became the first Black man to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song. Jones was having a banner year, writing the nominated song "The Eyes of Love," the title song for the eventual Best Picture winner In the Heat of the Night, and the Oscar-nominated score for In Cold Blood. Though he would become a superstar producer in the next decad...

Though the British Invasion of pop songs took place two years earlier, British cinema was becoming popular in the mid-1960s thanks to London taking the theme of the Swinging '60s very literally. Two of the Oscar-nominated songs from 1966 are title songs about two sexually-charged Brits, while one of its Oscar competitors is a very innocent (and brief) tune by the prim and proper British lady (at l...

One year after the Beatles gave us a rock 'n' roll movie musical, Frenchman Michel Legrand gave us the first fully sung-through original movie musical with The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. He and lyricist/director Jacques Demy set the world on fire with this candy-colored film that featured a moving Oscar-nominated song competing for the award with two comedy songs and a new tune from the popular duo o...

Though 1964 was celebrated for the return of the original movie musical with the release of Mary Poppins, there was another movie release that set the world on fire with its revolutionary music. A Hard Day's Night was the film debut of the Beatles during their yearlong "invasion" in the United States. What is remarkable about 1964 as far as the Oscars is concerned is how none of the songs from the...

Movie songs were on an upswing of popularity with the public after the success of "Moon River," but 1963 did not help that cause with a list of five Oscar-nominated songs that were not major hits. One of the songs came from a cringe-inducing Italian documentary, while another was from a Jackie Gleason movie that started as a musical but got many of the songs cut out as Hollywood continued to shy a...

Film composers were starting to take over the duties of writing the music for movie songs in the 1960s, and that was evident in the list of Oscar-nominated songs from 1962. Four of the five songs contain music by score composers instead of trained songwriters, which signaled the likely end of an era for the Hollywood songwriter. Sammy Fain was the only traditional song composer of the bunch, writi...

Director Blake Edwards and composer Henry Mancini had been working in Hollywood in relative obscurity for a while, but in 1961, they blasted into superstardom with the release of the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's. The Oscar-nominated song "Moon River" became one of the most popular songs that year, though studio executives had briefly fought to cut it from the movie. The story of that song, and the...

Rock and roll and Hollywood still fought with the public for their ears and money when it came to popular songs in 1960. Elvis was still the King of Rock 'n' Roll, but movie songs were failing to gain much respect and love from audiences. The five nominees for the Original Song Oscar in 1960 proved that, though they were not of extremely bad quality. Host Jeff Commings brings you the histories of...

Sammy Cahn quickly became the king of the movie songs, earning Oscar nominations 15 and 16 for two title songs that he wrote in 1959 for Frank Sinatra and Johnny Mathis. Sammy Cahn's nemesis, Dimitri Tiomkin, was back in the Oscar songwriting game with Ned Washington, both of whom had started the trend of giving dramatic films a rousing title song. Who's going to emerge victorious for songs writte...

The Academy's music branch made the nomination process for the Best Original Song Oscar a lot more interesting beginning in 1958. The new preliminary shortlist was started in this year, whittling down the many potential nominees down to 10 before another vote gave us the official five nominees. How will that affect the songs that make it through to the final five? Host Jeff Commings will let you k...

One would think that the movie musical was dying in 1957, given that only one of the Oscar-nominated original songs from that year came from a musical. Usually, three or four original songs are nominated from musicals. That doesn't mean that the movie musical is officially dying, but title songs from dramatic pictures are now becoming more successful. Learn more about the four title songs and one...

Six of the nine men nominated for the Best Original Song Oscar for 1956 had already won at least one Academy Award. Will this year's winner add another golden boy to their mantels? Or will it be first-timers Tom Adair and Leith Stevens for their song "Julie"? Will Cole Porter ride the popularity that Bing Crosby has in the Academy and win an Oscar for "True Love?" Find out with host Jeff Commings...

Rock and roll officially invaded the movie theaters in 1955 with the release of the drama Blackboard Jungle. That movie did not feature an original song, which probably made the eight men nominated for the Oscar that year a little relieved. But the competition was still tough that year, featuring a song that made very few ripples in 1955 but would become a megahit 35 years later. Find out more abo...

The battle for the Academy award for Best Original Song became a little more intense in 1954, as the film composer competed with the professional songwriter for control over who writes songs for the movies. Dimitri Tiomkin began the war after winning the Oscar for "The Ballad of High Noon" in 1952, with Sammy Cahn serving as his rival. Will it be Tiomkin's soaring title song from The High and the...

Nat King Cole, Doris Day, and Dean Martin introduced three of the five Oscar-nominated songs for 1953, and all three are serious contenders for the Academy Award. Two of the songs have become favorites many decades later, written by men that had great track records of creating memorable Oscar-winning songs. Find out more about these tunes and the people who wrote them with host Jeff Commings on th...

Sammy Cahn's fifth consecutive Oscar nomination for songwriting came for his second gig writing for opera star Mario Lanza. Cahn will have tough competition for the Academy Award for Original Song, as the new writing duo of Ned Washington and Dimitri Tiomkin came up with a new twist on the title song and Oscar winners Harry Warren and Leo Robin came up with a catchy tune for Bing Crosby and Joan W...

Alan Jay Lerner was very busy in 1951, writing the screenplay for An American In Paris, writing songs for the Broadway show Paint Your Wagon and working with Burton Lane for eight songs for the movie musical Royal Wedding. That Fred Astaire movie featured the Oscar-nominated song "Too Late Now," which marked Lerner's first songwriting Oscar nomination. Will he win on his first try, or will Oscar H...

One of the Oscar-nominated songs for the year 1950 is very well-known, but the version of "Mona Lisa" that Nat King Cole made famous is not the one heard in the movie Captain Carey USA. Learn more about the history behind the creation of this song on this episode of The Best Song Podcast, and how the songwriters fought to put it into the movie. Among the other four nominees is the story of how a s...

Two of the songs nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song of 1949 probably should not have been eligible for the award. One of them had been written many years earlier, while the other heavily borrowed from a folk song written about a century earlier. As host Jeff Commings talks about the origins of these two songs, you can decide if they deserved Oscar nominations.