Oscar's deaf ear goes for obscure songs

Hey, want to stump your friends with a new version of Name That Tune? Ask them to hum a few bars of any of this year's Oscar nominees for best song. The chances are, they won't even be able to fake it.

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The most popular of the bunch, Counting Crows' Accidentally in Love from Shrek 2, peaked at No. 39 on Billboard's Hot 100 last fall. The rest - Al Otro Lado del Rio from The Motorcycle Diaries, Believe from The Polar Express, Learn to Be Lonely from The Phantom of the Opera, and Look to Your Path (Vois Sur Ton Chemin) from The Chorus - rarely got heard outside the darkened confines of the multiplex. If the song played over the closing credits, you were probably too busy scrolling your cell phone messages to have noticed anyway.

To add award-show insult to lack-of-airplay injury, one of the year's most notable musical collaborations - Mick Jagger and Dave Stewart's Golden-Globe-winning Old Habits Die Hard, from Alfie - went unrecognized. No surprise there, because even that wasn't a hit on the radio.

So if you sense old-man Oscar getting ever more willful and weird in his song choices every year, you're right ... sort of. Usually, there's at least one across-the-board, even-your-parents'-dentist-knows-it smash on the list. Two years ago, it was Eminem's statue-grabbing Lose Yourself, from 8 Mile. Even the most pop-culturally confounded can't scrub the chorus of 1998 nominee I Don't Want to Miss a Thing (from Armageddon) or 1997 winner My Heart Will Go On (Titanic) out of their brains.

Yet the hits and American Idol fodder are always equaled, if not outnumbered, by tunes that only the songwriter's family remembers.

OK, you say, so it's been a case of diminishing hit returns for Oscar nominees in the past few years. But surely, in some gilded age, all five of the nominees were radio-familiar standards, right? Well, maybe.

1969 was a classic, offering What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life? from The Happy Ending, Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Come Saturday Morning from The Sterile Cuckoo, Jean from The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and True Grit's title theme.

1970, however, brought the theme from Pieces of Dreams, Thank You Very Much from Scrooge, Til Love Touches Your Life from Madron and Whistling Away the Dark from Darling Lili. Go ahead, sing a verse. The only true hit was the winner: The Carpenters' For All We Know from Lovers and Other Strangers.

On The Net:

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
www.oscars.org

The Academy Awards on ABC-TV
www.oscar.com

--From the Wednesday, February 9, 2005 printed edition of the Augusta Chronicle