The Best Song Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

The five Oscar-nominated songs of 2021 feature Beyonce earning her first nomination for writing the anthemic song giving tribute to the famous tennis stars Venus and Serena Williams, as well as the chart-topping theme song to Danie Craig's final movie as James Bond. Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O'Connell wrote that song and released it in February 2020, giving "No Time to Die" 20 months to earn the public's praise as the Bond film suffered two COVID release delays. Did the extended runway for the song help it take off and earn an Oscar for the O'Connell siblings? Find out on this episode of The Best Song Podcast!

The COVID pandemic forced film studios to adjust release dates of their big movies, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences followed suit by adjusting the eligibility dates for their 2021 ceremony. The result meant some songs nominated for the Oscar came from films released in January and February 2021. Diane Warren was the only nominated songwriter who had previous Oscar experience, earning nomination 12 for a song that was translated into Italian for Sophia Loren's latest film. Would Warren win over three songs about political and social upheaval, or one about an Icelandic town performed in the finale of a comedy film?

For the first time in Academy Awards history, only two songs were picked by the music branch as worthy of Oscar consideration. A few other songs by big names in the music industry missed out on the coveted nominations this year, including one by Madonna. You'll hear the two nominated songs on this episode, and learn why Madonna was once again shunned by the Academy.

Only four songs were nominated for the Original Song Oscar for 2010, and three of them were written by previous Oscar winners. learn more about these four songs, and the ones that Diane Warren had hoped would get her back in the Oscar race, but were shut out.

The Academy increased its number of Best Picture nominees from five to 10 for the 2009 movie year, but the minimum of Best Original Song nominees dropped from three to two. Was this a signal that maybe the music branch was worried about getting at least three quality songs nominated? That wasn't a problem in 2009, when Randy Newman got two nominations for his songs from the musical The Princess and the Frog and a little-known movie from France got one of its songs named as an Oscar nominee, thanks to the Academy's nomination system for movie songs.

Only three songs were nominated for the Academy Award in 2008, the first time that had happened in 20 years. In this episode, we learn about the three songs, including two from prolific Bollywood composer A.R. Rahman that gave us some new sounds that had not been presented in Hollywood films. The other song gave Thomas Newman another chance to end his Oscar losing streak, thanks to his work on his second animated Pixar movie.

Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz monopolized the Original Song Oscar nominees for 2007, giving us three songs from their Disney musical Enchanted that paid homage to previous Disney classic songs and paid homage to them at the same time. Also nominated was a poignant song from a movie drawing from the Oliver Twist story, and a love song from a very low-budget Irish movie about two lost souls finding love through music. Learn more about these five songs and the people who created them on this episode!

Another film earned three Oscar nominations for original song, and this time it was the film adaptation of the Broadway smash musical Dreamgirls. Henry Krieger, the original composer of the stage show, enlisted new lyricists to work with him on the songs that impressed the Academy enough to get three into the list of five. Melissa Etheridge's history-making nomination as the first song to come from a documentary, and another nomination from Randy Newman made 2006 a very competitive year for the Original Song Oscar.

Only three songs were nominated by the Academy's music branch from 2005, perhaps signaling that the quality of songs was going downward sharply. But, maybe this marked just a blip in the movie music industry. Take a listen to the nominated songs and why the Academy only picked three in 2005.

Andrew Lloyd Webber finally got the movie version of The Phantom of the Opera into movie theaters, and got an Oscar nomination for putting an original song into the film. The other nominees for the 2004 Original Song Oscar included two songs not performed in English, the first time that had happened. But, more memorable about the year was who performed the majority of the songs at the Oscar ceremony. Learn all about it on this episode!