What Does the Oscars Have Against Songs in Comedies?
This year’s Academy Award nominations were just announced, shining a spotlight on some of the best movies of the year, plus some pretty bad movies, and also a bunch of stuff that nobody has ever heard of and may or may not actually be real for all we know.
One snub that some fans are clearly disappointed about is the lack of a nomination for Will & Harper in the Best Documentary category. The acclaimed doc followed Will Ferrell and his friend Harper Steele on a cross-country road trip, shortly after her decision to transition in 2021.
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Will & Harper also, arguably, deserved a nomination for Best Original Song. In the movie, Ferrell and Steele task Kristen Wiig with penning an anthem for their road trip. The resulting “Harper and Will Go West” is surprisingly good; it’s catchy, and has clever lyrics, such as how it compares the duo to “Thelma and Louise, but with a lot less death.”
When Netflix released the film last year, Wiig and co-writer Sean Douglas seemed like a lock for the Best Original Song category, and The Los Angeles Times reported that Netflix would be launching an Oscar campaign to promote the song.
So what happened? Well, the Academy, historically, hasn’t been great at rewarding songs written for and/or by comedians.
It’s been well-established that the Academy doesn’t love nominating comedies for Best Picture, or recognizing comedic performances in their acting categories. But it seems as though songs are also impacted by this apparent anti-comedy bias.
The most notorious example of this was when South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut was nominated in 2000. Robin Williams brought the house down with his performance of “Blame Canada” —
— but then the award went to Phil Collins for “You’ll Be in My Heart,” from Disney’s Tarzan, a song that is best enjoyed while waiting on hold with the bank.
Before that Little Shop of Horror’s “Mean Green Mother From Outer Space” lost out to Top Gun’s “Take My Breath Away.” And in the early 2000s, A Mighty Wind’s “A Kiss at the End of the Rainbow,” performed by Eugene Levy and Catherine O’Hara, failed to best an Annie Lennox song about Hobbits.
Even back in the ‘70s, Mel Brooks and John Morris’ catchy theme song for Blazing Saddles ended up losing to a sappy love song from a movie about a burning skyscraper.
When comedies do win in this category, they tend to win for unfunny songs. The Gene Wilder rom-com sex farce The Woman in Red earned an Oscar for the decidedly humorless Stevie Wonder track “I Just Called to Say I Love You.” And, incidentally, it beat out a little song called “Ghostbusters.”
Barbie won last year — not for “I’m Just Ken,” but for the saddest song on the entire soundtrack, “What Was I Made For?” sung by Billie Eilish.
One exception was when The Flight of the Conchords’ Bret McKenzie won for “Man or Muppet” from The Muppets in 2011.
But for one thing, there were only two nominated songs that year. And the Oscars didn’t even allow “Man or Muppet” to be performed during the show. Plus, that win only came after decades of ignoring other, Oscar-worthy Muppet tunes. For example, “It Goes Like It Goesv from Norma Rae beat “Rainbow Connection” from The Muppet Movie.
Sorry Crash and Green Book, that might just be the worst Oscar decision ever.
