Ranking All 80 Winners of Best Original Song (Plus Where This Year's Contenders Would Place)

Glenn here with a look at everybody’s favourite category – best original song! Okay, so, sure, even if this year’s roster for best original song doesn’t look like a vintage one for the category, there’s actually some fun to be had when you consider who will win.

• Will Diane Warren finally win an Oscar on her eighth nomination? And how strange will it be to see her win for a song from a documentary about sexual abuse alongside Lady Gaga rather than one of the chart-busting hit-singles that her first six nominations were for (lest we forget, Beyond the Lights’ “Grateful” didn’t chart because, well, Rita Ora).

• Will an opera tune win for the first time? No work of opera has ever been nominated if my research is correct, which is kinda neat even though I think the song is dirge (albeit appropriately so for the film).

• Will all the talk of diversity in cinema this year give us a winner that is either black (The Weeknd), transgender (Antony Hegarty), or gay (Sam Smith)?

• It’s been 18 years since the last occurrence of a movie winning both a Razzie and an Oscar. Plenty of films have been nominated for both of the awards, but neither has won an award from each since Wall Street in 1988. Could Fifty Shades of Grey break a very unique drought?

Now, naturally because we all love lists so I thought it would be fun to rank every winner of Oscar’s best original song category and see where this year’s contenders would fit in when they take home that golden statue. What could possible go wrong with a completely subjective ranking of over 80 songs?!? Oh dear. You’ve been warned, I guess. Two things to note: I have not included "The Last Time I Saw Paris" from Lady Be Good since even the writer of that 1941 song was angry it was given an award when it wasn't written for the movie (it was subsequently the impetus for the category's rule change). Secondly, I have tried to rank as close to original film versions as possible so some songs that were improved upon in later recordings (like Nat King Cole’s “Mona Lisa”) may not rank as high. And, yes, before you ask, I am the person that hates Mary Poppins and who has never seen much of the appeal of the overtly twee “Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head”.

Go over the rainbow after the jump...

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This just in... Academy's New Diversity Plans Announced

After the emergency meeting of the Oscar's governing board (51 players strong) to discuss what to do about their sorry track record of diversity these past few years -- #OscarsSoWhite had become the only story out of the Oscar nominations -- they've announced plans for changes to take effect immediately following this Oscar season.

It boils down to a plan to significantly expand & speed up the initiatives President Cheryl Boone Isaac had already put in place with one very significant change.

• New Members* 
  Though they've been adding more members annually already, between now and 2020 they vow to double the number of female and diverse voters. The Academy currently has about 6,261 voting members with estimates of women and nonwhite members making up about 1400 of that number so expect a couple those more members. 
• Three New Board Members
  The 51 seats will increase to 54 with the new members chosen by the President. (All eyes will be on who she selects I'm sure. Is it too much to ask that we get an LGBT person in there somewhere? Because the Academy's track record) 
• Membership Terms
  This one is the major change. It's no longer a lifetime appointment (unless you are an actual nominee or winner so yes Roberto Benigni gets to stay) but a ten year appointment. Members must be active in film during the decade to renew their membership when it's up. If they don't meet the criteria they will become "Members Emeritus". This will apply retroactively after the Oscars this year. Voters who do not qualify will not lose any privileges except voting. So they still get all the screenings and perks and such. 

* One more change involving the new members to be invited (which usually happens in the summer) was announced but it's a bit vague. Variety describes it like so:

The Academy will supplement the traditional process in which current members sponsor new members by launching an ambitious, global campaign to identify and recruit qualified new members who represent greater diversity.

Cheryl Boone Isaacs, the Academy's current President

Cheryl Boone Isaacs states:

The Academy is going to lead and not wait for the industry to catch up. These new measures regarding governance and voting will have an immediate impact and begin the process of significantly changing our membership composition.”

This is all very promising but we'll still need the industry to catch up to insure that different types of stories are told and heard each year. And audiences will still need to support stories that aren't about superheroes or men to get more of these films made. But that's another struggle.

For now hear hear on Ms. Isaac's swift actions! 

HERE IS THE ACADEMY'S PRESS RELEASE

Michael Caine Just Like All of Us: Assumes Leo Will Win Oscar

Dancin' Dan here with your latest Best Actor Oscar news.

In an interview with with Britain's Radio 4, the venerable two-time Oscar winner dared to step in the #OscarsSoWhite quagmire (let's just not go there, shall we?), asking people to be patient "Of course it will come. It took me years to get an Oscar."

More importantly, he reminded everyone about the best part of not being nominated: You don't have to attend the ceremony.

24 hours on an aeroplane and I've got to sit there clapping Leonardo DiCaprio. I love Leonardo, he played my son in a movie, but I'm too old to travel that far and sit in an audience and clap someone else.

And even more importantly, he said aloud what everyone else knows but have mostly refrained from saying out loud: Leonardo DiCaprio is winning the Best Actor Oscar this year. Not that he's voting for Leo, or that this feels like Leo's year, but that he IS winning.

And certainly it seems like Leo's to lose. Who could pose a serious threat to the raw bison liver-eater?

Music Supervisors & Casting Directors have no Oscar category. But they do get prizes.

Here's two awards curiousity for your afternoon. Both involve guilds that differentiate their prizes not by genre but by budget (i.e. big, small, micro): Casting and Music Supervision.

The Guild of Music Supervisors has been giving out awards for six years now. The music supervisor's job entails finding pre existing music, getting rights to all the songs, overseeing all music related aspects of a production. This year their big winners were all films which various people have labelled "snubbed" over the past week: Straight Outta Compton, Carol, and Diary of a Teenage Girl. And Furious 7's "See You Again," which did not make Oscar's Original Song nominated shortlist, takes Original Song. (more about their awards here.) 

The Casting Society's "Artios" awards do things a little differently. They divide their awards both by budget and by comedy/drama. Their big budget winners: The Big Short / Straight Outta Compton. Their indie winners: Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and Room. Their low budget winners: Dope and The Stanford Prison Experiment.

That last one is a really great call because the film hasn't been in the conversation at all which means they were clearly thinking about its actual merit as opposed to hearing its name constantly in the "awards" circus. I've said since I saw it that one day it might read as a who's who of male stars before they were big. (More about their awards here.)

What's on your mind... besides Oscar Isaac?

Look at that cutie. No, not that one. Scroll down -- that doggie is so cute it almost pulls focus from Oscar Isaac, the web's current boyfriend. Apparently he plays a serial killer in his new film Mojave (opening in limited release) this weekend. I'm so over serial killers in movies. According to tv & movies serial killers must make up about 15% of the world's population and the one job market that's always booming is for Trained Assassins. By 2018 we'll all be dead!  

This is a long way of saying I'm probably not going to the movies this weekend (January is the one month I take a break aside from rescreenings of Oscar nominees for writing purposes) but maybe you are? The 5th Wave? The Boy? Dirty Grandpa? The Romanian Oscar submission Aferim! (when is Romania going to catch a break with the Oscars?)?

What are your cinematic plans this weekend? What's on your movie mind?