It's Oscars weekend, and most of the attention will be focused on the Red Carpet, the major categories like Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor and Best Actress, and for the casual viewer, maybe expecting some drama like announcing the wrong winner LaLa Land instead of Moonlight? or maybe the Slap Heard Around the World Will Smith on Chris Rock? But one category I've only just started paying attention to was Best Original Song, which looking at its history has yielded quite a few memorable tunes. The one that I wandered into was "As Time Goes By" featured in the iconic movie "Casablanca," which I've only ever seen once but gets referenced in Jeopardy plenty of times down to where Laszlo and Ilsa are flying to at the end of the movie (Portugal), but I still remember Ilsa asking Sam (Dooley Wilson) to "Play it again, Sam" asking fro "As Time Goes By." You must remember this, A kiss is just a kiss......
And that's just No. 2 on the all-time list of AFI's list of best songs ever! No. 1 is hard to beat, "(Somewhere) Over the Rainbow" sung by Judy Garland in The Sound of Music. The top 10 list is probably hard to beat ever, just from the timeless quality and sheer number of people who know those tones and get exposed to them from a young age, like Pinocchio's "When you Wish Upon a Star" is in almost every Disney song collage as their iconic highlight music, Stayin' Alive by the Bee Gees (from Saturday Night Fever) has common usage like being used as the beat for performing CPR, those aren't going away. Also, MJ has this odd fascination for the song "Chim Chim Cher-ee" from Mary Poppins, singing it whenever it pops up in something we're watching or even when we're not watching anything, just singing it with wild unexplained exuberance.
One song that might push into history's lore might be Billie Eilish's "What Was I Made for" from the Barbie Movie, just because of how pervasive the Barbie movie was but the message of the song about why human beings are on Earth and if we're all just dolls in some Barbie world. I definitely had that song playing once per day for several weeks, capped off by hearing it being played in Mexico at a bar, attesting to the power of song but also the power of Barbie. Some years the Best Song is very forgettable and not even the most famous song in the movie (Naatu Naatu in 2022 in Encanto, over "We don't talk about Bruno?" but "Shallow" in 2018 with Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper still persists today in Youtube commercials and various montages, and on the negative side some songs have just become earworms destined to play on a loop like the Bad Place described in "A Good Place." I'm talking about "Let it Go," sung very well by Idina Menzel in Frozen, but nonstop, to the point of asking if that song can just let our eardrums go.
So yes, I will be paying attention to who wins the Academy Awards this year (a lot of buzz about the Brutalist and its brutal 3 hours 37 minute run time, with intermissions in between) as well as Emilia Perez, but add one other category I'm looking forward to: Best Original Song, because "As Time Goes By," there are more and more songs that enter the cannon that might pop up on Jeopardy one day that I will undoubtedly have trouble remembering.
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