One Category at a Time: Best Original Song

With little in the way of industry precursors to go by (The Golden Globe and Critics Choice are the only two that come to mind), trying to anticipate who wins Best Original Song at the Oscars can be a crap shoot. However, whenever those two precursors agree on a contender that's also Oscar-nominated, it tends to win.

My Award Nominations: Original Score

As always, the evolving state of movie music continues to yield distinctive, unique work every single year. Which five Original Scores from 2016 did I decide on? Have a listen after the cut...

My Award Nominations: Original Song

It promises to be a slow news week for awards watchers, with little to do but twiddle our thumbs while the number crunchers at PwC determine the nominees who will be announced next Tuesday. So now seems an apt time for me to start running through my own year-in-review rituals. I'll be listing nominations for my personal ballot periodically over the course of the next six weeks, culminating in my Top 20 and my selection of winners the Friday before the Oscars.

It was a stellar year for movie songs (pleasant U-turn from 2015's wasteland), especially thanks to three original musicals providing us with catchy new tunes. Theoretically, I could have filled all five of my Best Original Song slots using any one of them, but in the spirit of spreading the wealth, I made the executive decision to only select a single entry from each. It wouldn't be fair otherwise, especially to some non-musicals with worthy tracks to feast our ears upon.

Here are the final five I've settled on, followed by a longer-than-usual list of second tier contenders:

Review - La La Land

We all know the how the showbiz story goes: Boy and girl meet, boy and girl fall in love, boy and girl's careers diverge. It's a sturdy formula that the movies have retooled and retold a million times, from the silent escapades of Show People to the melodramatic tumult of A Star is Born (all three of them, and counting) to the worldly post-modernism of Annie Hall to the silent escapades of The Artist – Funny how things come full circle.

Point being, if you want to play that old song again, you need to riff; Improvise; Make it special. Fortunately for hopeless romantics everywhere, 32 year old writer/director Damien Chazelle is indeed a special talent, who has now performed a spectacular riff on the 'Hollywood love story' in La La Land;
A dazzling musical ode to a city, to a genre, and to anyone who ever dared to dream large and love larger.

It was Chazelle's sizzling sophomore feature Whiplash that put him on the map two years ago, snagging a trio of Oscars and topping this critic's 'Best of 2014' list. So when it was announced that his next dream was to make an original movie musical – that rarest of beasts – I was on board. All pretense of objectivity aside, I probably loved this film before the ink was dry on the first draft of the screenplay.