The Best Song Podcast

Episode 81: Your Heart Is On My Sleeve (2013)

A major scandal hit the Original Song Oscar category for 2013, as a song was deemed ineligible for the award after the nominations announcement. Learn more about that song and what caused it to be disqualified on this episode, plus the two hit songs that made a big impression on the worldwide public and fought for the Oscar.

Episode 80: I'm Drowning In the Laughter (2012)

The 50th anniversary of the first James Bond movie brought the 23rd Bond film, introducing superstar pop singer Adele into the movie songwriting world. Her title song for Skyfall was a big hit, and helped the movie make a mint worldwide. Would Adele and the fanfare around Bond's 50th anniversary help end the drought for Bond songs, or would Seth McFarlane win the award for a song about a friendship between a boy and his teddy bear? Or would a new song for Les Miserables take the win? Host Jeff Commings brings you the stories of all five Oscar-nominated songs of 2012 on this episode.

Episode 79: Get Up and Join In the Fun (2011)

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.

Episode 78: Ain’t Nothin’ But a Blue Sky Now (2010)

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.

Episode 77: Fairy Tales Can Come True (2009)

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.

Episode 76: There’s No Better Place to Go (2008)

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.

Episode 75: Feeling Like a Motherless Child (2007)

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!

Episode 74: You’ve Taken My Heart (2006)

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.