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The 90s were a boom time for movie soundtrack compilations and 1995 was the peak. The #1 selling single on the Billboard Hot 100 was Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise,” culled from the “Dangerous Minds” soundtrack, while the #4 selling single, Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose,” was included on the “Batman Forever” soundtrack. Other big Billboard hits of the year like Diana King’s “Shy Guy” and Dr. Dre’s “Keep Their Heads Ringin’” came from the “Bad Boys” and “Friday” soundtracks, respectively. The “Friday” soundtrack spent two weeks as the top-selling album in America and the “Dangerous Minds” soundtrack was the top-selling record for all of September. Oh, but there was so much more.
There were soundtracks with contemporary appeal, like those for “Empire Records” and “Mallrats” reflecting the era of alternative rock, and soundtracks with a historical pull, like “Dead Presidents” collecting so many great old R&B and Soul tunes that it released a Part One and Part Two. The Parker Posey-fronted cult classic “Party Girl” would have been unthinkable without its club-ready soundtrack while the “Boys on the Side” soundtrack was like proto-Lilith Fair. I requested for the latter for Christmas in 1995 and though Bonnie Raitt’s “You Got It” was the big single, as a Sheryl Crow stan, I most enjoyed her giving the Derek and the Dominos slice of blues-rock “Keep on Growing” a pop bent. (Wait, I have to stop and listen again right now. We continue.) Raitt’s song was a cover too, of Roy Orbison, and that brings me to my point: virtually none of the music I have mentioned was eligible to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song.
Covers are disqualified. That’s why Whitney Houston could not be nominated, never mind win, for her globe-conquering “I Will Always Love You” from “The Bodyguard” in 1992, remember. Songs not written specifically for the movie itself are ineligible too, which disqualified “Kiss from a Rose,” plucked from Seal’s eponymous album released a year earlier. Songs that include samples are also ineligible which is why “Gangsta’s Paradise” in addition to “Keep Their Heads Ringin’” and “Shy Guy” could not make the cut. In a year where so much current pop music bled over into the movies, so much of it could not be recognized, leaving a Best Song category that looked like so many Best Song categories before it, not quite five unsalted crackers lined up in a row but close. And that is why I am here to reimagine this category if I, and I alone, were the judge and jury. Because what a category it could have been.
1995 Best Original Song Oscar Nominees (winner in bold):
Colors of the Wind from Pocahontas - Music by Alan Menken and Lyrics by Stephen Schwartz
Dead Man Walkin’ from Dead Man Walking - Music & Lyrics by Bruce Springsteen
Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman? from Don Juan DeMarco - Music & Lyrics by Bryan Adams, Michael Kamen & Mutt Lange
Moonlight from Sabrina - Music by John Williams and Lyrics by Marilyn Bergman
You’ve Got a Friend in Me from Toy Story - Music & Lyrics by Randy Newman
Of course, we are required to remember right up front that Best Original Song is strictly limited to original songs in whatever byzantine way the Academy defines originality, eliminating old pop hits used in movies which should be a category unto itself but, as always, do not get me started. That means that “God Moving Over the Face of The Waters” by Moby in “Heat and “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley in “Strange Days” are ineligible. Add, say, “Love Is Strange” by Mickey & Sylvia in “Casino,” “Come Here” by Kath Bloom in “Before Sunrise,” and, of course, “Techno Syndrome” by The Immortals in “Mortal Kombat” and, my God, what a category. Alas.
In researching this post, I was shocked to learn that the “Don Juan DeMarco” soundtrack was initially slated to include a duet recorded by, get this, Tori Amos and Michael Stipe. That song, “It Might Hurt a Bit,” was not included and never released, shunted for a Bryan Adams ballad that despite featuring preeminent flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia still, in the end, feels like a Bryan Adams ballad. And arriving as it did on the heels of both “Robin Hood” and “The Three Musketeers,” this one was like the dishwater left in the sink after all the dishes have been cleaned. Enough was enough, alright, Academy. It was time to move on to other things. Like Salt-N-Pepa’s body-positive “I Am the Body Beautiful” off the “To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar” soundtrack that as best I can tell, deployed a wholly original beat which would have made it eligible.
Ok. Time to address the elephant in the room – my main man, Bruce Springsteen. His theme for “Dead Man Walking” is solid. His musical spareness in this era could sometimes get the best of him, but it works well for this one, and though he cribs one lyric from his own songbook, he splits the difference with one that is just classic Bruce: “Sister, I won’t ask forgiveness. My sins are all I have.” But the truth is, Springsteen wrote a similarly themed sort of song the same year, “Highway 29,” that is vastly superior, as was his Oscar-winning Best Song two years prior, “Streets of Philadelphia.” And anyway, while “Dead Man Walking” is a very good movie, “Clueless,” strange as it might sound to compare them was better and deserved a Best Picture nod and the principal song of “The Clueless” soundtrack, Jill Sobule’s “Supermodel,” which was, in fact, written for the movie and therefore eligible under the Oscar’s rules, deserved a Best Song nod too. Springsteen is out and Sobule is in.
I am tempted to include “Ask for You” from the “Higher Learning” soundtrack, Raphael Saddiq’s bop that got all the way to #19 on the Billboard Hot 100, but I can’t bring myself to leave off “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” the foundational linchpin of “Toy Story” and the whole subsequent series. Of the actual nominees, that probably should have won, and it will be the only song to retain its nomination, even if I suspect that Randy Newman would tell me to keep it if he’s not getting the retroactive win.
The easy listening of “Moonlight,” meanwhile, is barely worth a mention, reminding me of a line from Public Enemy’s “How to Kill a Radio Consultant”: “When ‘A Quiet Storm’ comes on I fall asleep.” The winning “Colors of the Wind,” meanwhile, is fine, I guess, but mostly just riding the coattails of the Disney songs that won this same award three of the four years preceding it. Because there is one soundtrack that some astute readers may have noticed I had not yet mentioned: “Waiting to Exhale,” a Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds-produced record so good that it was #1 on the charts for five weeks in early 1996, earned 11 Grammy nominations, and even forced self-proclaimed dean of the rock critics Robert Christgau to grudgingly grade it an A-. That none of its songs were nominated speaks to the 68th Academy Awards nominating but a single black nominee in all categories, leading to natural backlash, fury, and protest, much of it spurred by the recently deceased Jesse Jackson a couple decades before #OscarsSoWhite. I mean, no one could even mount a bad-faith argument about the American cultural meritocracy when it came to the “Waiting to Exhale” soundtrack because if that were true, the album would have had two nominations in this category, at least.
The lead single was Whitney Houston’s “Exhale (Shoop Shoop)” which was nominated for Song of the Year at the Grammys and was #14 on Billboard’s Hot 100 for 1996. It was a quality song, you don’t need me to tell you that, but remember, I’m judge and jury here and I’m giving the first spot to TLC’s “This Is How It Works.” Because I love the song, of course, and also because I like imagining a bunch of white septuagenarian and octogenarians watching a performance of a song by three black women coaching their men through sex while a person in the production room sits there the whole time on panicked edge like Beaker with his finger hovering over the broadcast delay button. It might have been the greatest five minutes in Oscar history. Alas.
But. In the end, the faux retroactive Oscar can only go to one song off the “Waiting to Exhale” soundtrack, and it goes to Toni Braxton’s. If you ask me now, 30 years later, to explain what 1995-96 sounded like, well, I might just play you Toni Braxton’s “Let It Flow.”
