Academy Award for Best Original Song
The Academy Award for Best Song is one of the awards given to people working in the motion picture industry by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; nominations are made by Academy members who are songwriters and composers. The winners are chosen by the Academy membership as a whole. In recent years, as the presentation ceremony has become a glitzy spectacle shown on television around the world, nominees are often invited to perform their songs live. The ceremony is valuable exposure for solo artistes and groups whose members write music for the cinema, and also a showcase for material which might be used in film soundtracks at a future date.
1934 - 1940
1941 - 1950
1951 - 1960
1961 - 1970
1971 - 1980
1981 - 1990
1991 - 2000
2001 -
Most awards won
- Number of times nominated in parentheses
- 4 : Sammy Cahn (26)
- 4 : Alan Menken (10)
- 4 : Johnny Mercer (18)
- 4 : James Van Heusen (14)
- 3 : Ray Evans (7)
- 3 : Jay Livingston (7)
- 3 : Tim Rice (5)
- 3 : Harry Warren (11)
- 3 : Paul Francis Webster (16)
- 2 : Howard Ashman (7)
- 2 : Burt Bacharach (5)
- 2 : Alan Bergman (15)
- 2 : Marilyn Bergman (15)
- 2 : Sammy Fain (10)
- 2 : Oscar Hammerstein II (5)
- 2 : Joel Hirschhorn (3)
- 2 : Will Jennings (3)
- 2 : Al Kasha (3)
- 2 : Jerome Kern (7)
- 2 : Henry Mancini (11)
- 2 : Giorgio Moroder (2)
- 2 : Stephen Schwartz (2)
- 2 : Ned Washington (11)
Trivia
- Randy Newman was nominated sixteen times before finally winning the award for his 2001 song If I Didn't Have You from Monsters, Inc..
- Eminem, Jeff Bass and Luis Resto were the first to win the Best Song Oscar for a rap song, in 2002 for Lose Yourself from 8 Mile. The song was not performed at the 75th Academy Awards because Eminem declined to attend the ceremony.
- Manos Hadjidakis was the first to receive the honour for a song originally written in a language other than English, in 1960 for Ta Paidia toy Peiraia from the Greek film Pote tin Kyriaki.
- Jorge Drexler was the second foreign language songwriter to win the award, for Al Otro Lado del Río from The Motorcycle Diaries in 2004. That year another foreign language writing pair were nominated, composer Bruno Coulais and lyricist Christophe Barratier for Vois Sur Ton Chemin (Look To Your Path) from the French movie Les Choristes.
- Dorothy Fields was the first female songwriter to win the Best Song Oscar. She wrote the lyrics for the 1936 winner The Way You Look Tonight (music by Jerome Kern) sung by Fred Astaire in the film Swing Time. It was thirty-two years until there was a second woman so honoured, Marilyn Bergman, who co-wrote with husband Alan the lyrics for Windmills of Your Mind (music Michel Legrand) from The Thomas Crown Affair in 1968. Female winners remain scarce, Barbra Streisand was the first female tunesmith (Evergreen from A Star Is Born in 1976), the other winners are Carole Bayer Sager (Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do) from Arthur in 1981), Buffy Sainte-Marie (Up Where We Belong from An Officer and a Gentleman in 1982), Irene Cara (Flashdance... What a Feeling from Flashdance in 1983), Carly Simon, the only woman to win on her own, with Let the River Run from Working Girl in 1988, and Annie Lennox (Into the West from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in 2003).
- As of 2006, songs from ten Walt Disney films have won this award, six of them having won over the eleven year period from 1989 to 1999.
