Sean Weitner | Whoomp! There You'll Be

I'm fairly certain I couldn't stand to listen to any of those Best Songs more than once.

"Until," Sting, Kate & Leopold
"May It Be," Enya, et al., The Fellowship of the Ring
"If I Didn't Have You," Randy Newman, Monsters, Inc.
"There You'll Be," Diane Warren, Pearl Harbor
"Vanilla Sky," Paul McCartney, Vanilla Sky

"If I Didn't Have You" works in the context of Monsters, Inc. so long as you think that Monsters, Inc. needs a song. And I suppose that if I have to listen to adult contemporary music, I'd want to be listening to Sting. But I have the Vanilla Sky soundtrack, and Paul McCartney's title track is the only song I regularly skip. The McCartney who slaughtered "A Hard Day's Night" with Terry Bradshaw ("It's been a hard day's night/ I've been working like a log") at the Super Bowl is the same McCartney who wrote this disposable tune.

Also: Could there be five more generic titles? Granted, "Vanilla Sky" is intentionally generic, but still.

Andy Ross | Blecch

I can't imagine a worse list of music nominees. Here's what the Oscars are thinking: "Hmmm, E! and Leno made fun of Björk when she wore that swan dress last year. Maybe we should stop nominating songs sung by artists under 40."

You know what the best Oscar music moment was in recent history? It was when Elliott Smith sang his Good Will Hunting song. There he was, on the same stage that all these divas like Celine Dion had stood gowned and backed by an orchestra. And, it was just him and a guitar and no one else.

See, that was wonderful, but it wasn't what the Oscars are about. Spectacle and pomp need the orchestra (or at least the Vienna Boys Choir). All these choices were the kind that could accommodate that.

Sean Weitner | Leaving the box behind

So let's be completely unrealistic, think completely outside Oscar's box, and see what we can come up with as far as better choices for Best Original Song. We'll follow the Academy's rule — the song itself has to have been written for the movie (covers are out). And "Come What May," an original tune from Moulin Rouge, was disqualified somehow because it had been written for Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, so we'll try to be commensurately picky in our own choices.

Eric Wittmershaus | Best Original Song

I don't know about you, but I scratch my head at this category nearly every year. Very few songs used effectively in movies are originals and many of those that are originals fail to hold up for me when I hear them outside of the context of the movie? (The Dancer in the Dark soundtrack falls under this category). I can't think of a single original song that grabbed my attention this year. There was no equivalent to Jonathan Richman crooning in Something About Mary, no match for Air's "Playground Love" from The Virgin Suicides. Nothing that even came close to the stuff in Dancer in the Dark. In fact, were I a member of the Academy, I would have nominated that Blueshammer song from Ghost World just because it was so sublimely awful.

Sean Weitner | Blueshammer for President

Your first point is excellent, Eric. Artistically, almost no one profits from a new song. The people who get praised for their use of music in film — Wes Anderson, Cameron Crowe, Quentin Tarantino — tend to only use new recordings for covers. Otherwise, it's all older music that has some pop connection. For those filmmakers, it's about assembling the feeling of their movie by appropriating, reinterpreting, magnifying, clarifying and exalting music that's already in the public realm. It's about mixing meanings — pastiche. For audiences to be able to grasp a new song (or, at least, a song with lyrics), they have to be able to tune out the rest of the movie to evaluate it and determine its place. When Curtis Hanson got a new Dylan tune for Wonder Boys, he presented it right: by running simple white-on-black credits for the duration of the song. Unless we're dealing with musicals, the whole idea of Best Song is, as you suggest, pretty pointless. Which is why Disney always won, I guess; they were making musicals.

Eric Wittmershaus | The Randy Newman Phenomenon

Did you guys know the guy's been nominated for 11 Oscars (including this year's), yet he's never won? I mean, the guy writes amazing songs, and I'm not sure "If I Didn't Have You" rates among his best work, but it's possible he keeps getting nominated because there are a lot of Newman fans in the Academy. He did, after all, write a song called "I Love L.A."

Sean, you extrapolated perfectly on what I was thinking when I wrote that; but the converse is true as well. When you put a new song in a movie, it's very difficult for listeners to hear the song without thinking of how it's used in the film. It's why I almost never buy soundtrack albums (The only 2001 soundtrack I bought was Ghost World, and not for the Blueshammer track). I'd much rather watch the movie again and hear the songs than play them on my headphones while I walk to the bank. The only exceptions I can think of for original songs that function outside the films are the Dylan song you mentioned and Air's "Playground Love" from The Virgin Suicides. That may have been closing credits music, too. I can't remember.

I think part of the reason Tarantino is so successful at using music in film is his ability to re-shape what a song means. I mean, he completely changed "Stuck In the Middle With You" for anyone who saw Reservoir Dogs. Wes Anderson is someone who pulls this off, too, though I didn't think he was nearly as successful in Tenenbaums at this as he was in Rushmore. An interesting side note to this is that Anderson's use of Cat Stevens in Rushmore directly recalled Hal Ashby's extensive Cat Stevens usage in Harold and Maude. So while Anderson chose to use a different interpretation than Stevens intended, he was essentially recycling an old idea.

Sean Weitner | Oh, Very Young

You're neglecting the critical intermediary step of the Farrelly brothers' use of Cat Stevens in Kingpin.

Newman's folksy style has been perfect for Pixar, and he's witty enough to fit a song comfortably into a film production (take Meet the Parents, for instance) over all of the objections we just raised. You might say that this is a sign of his songs' blandness, but I'm willing to come up with just enough affection for his music to wish he'd finally take the statuette home.

I like to build up associations with a song, cinematic and otherwise. Wasn't Rob's decision to organize his LP collection "autobiographically" in High Fidelity truly the height of connoisseurship? So I don't quite jive with the idea that debuting a song in a movie is a permanent mark against it, although I see your point. But there's no question to me that what really makes a good use of music in song is, as you suggest, reinvention. Is that fair? I guess Say Anything didn't really reinvent "In Your Eyes." Hm. Let's work on this thesis.

Eric Wittmerhaus | There's a million things to be Well again, it's possible to successfully debut a song in a movie. "If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out" was, I believe, new to Harold and Maude, and it's one of my favorite Cat Stevens songs. Yet it's extremely tough. Even Air's "Playground Love," which is another movie original I liked, came out on CD a few weeks before the movie hit theaters and thus allowed me to form my own impressions of the song outside of the movie. You can successfully debut a song in a movie, but it has to be really transcendent material to break away from the filmic associations, or the song's ability to evoke a particular scene in a film has to be so vivid that the scene need not be viewed again to appreciate the song's original context.

Andy Ross | Reinvention

If reinvention or appropriation is the goal of film music, then I would like to nominate Wes Anderson for putting not one, but two versions of "Christmas Time is Here" in The Royal Tenenbaums to as a theme for Gwyneth Paltrow's character. That was a master stroke — maybe the master stroke of the year. Though I do bemoan his reliance on too many Nico songs throughout the rest of the film.

Sean Weitner | My heart going boom boom boom

Andy, the breath stuck in my throat when I heard the first strains of "Christmas Time is Here." What a melancholy anthem. Whether Rushmore or Tenenbaums uses music better is certainly an open question.

Eric: This is getting into something more personal that universal, methinks, but nevertheless … . If a song recalls a movie or a scene for me, it recalls it fully. A good 2001 example is "Salisbury Hill," that old Peter Gabriel warhorse. I had plenty of associations with the song last year; this year, it's compounded by Vanilla Sky, and not even Vanilla Sky, but the ad campaign for Vanilla Sky. In the ads for the film, the reassuring, familiar strains of the music accompany a montage of Cruise's happy, decadent life, but once the lyric "My heart going boom boom boom/ Son, he said, grab your things I've come to take you home" ends and there's that percussive burst, the ad stops the song short, leaving only its echo; meanwhile, a car is flying off a bridge. There's a new sense of reassurance when I listen to the song now; the song survives that moment and powers forth. So, new associations, and I appreciate that. If a song didn't bring back the memory of a scene full force, however, and instead only brought back a niggling sense of it, then, yeah, I can see how that complicates thing.

Eric Wittmershaus | Like a Rolling Stone

No, that's not what I mean. I'm clearly failing to convey what I mean. I mean that a really good original song has the power to stand on its own without the movie. The songs from Dancer in the Dark, for example, are really effective in their cinematic context, but the visual images accompanying the songs are essential to my appreciation of them. In other words, I'd rather watch Dancer in the Dark to see the "music videos," for lack of a better term, than just listen to the soundtrack. But in the case of "Playground Love" and "If You Want to Sing Out, Sing Out," the songs are so good they transcend their original context. That's what I'm talking about.

Like the John Cusack character in High Fidelity, I appreciate songs from a somewhat selfish autobiographical standpoint; "Like a Rolling Stone" will always be the song that came on the radio when I was driving over the Bay Bridge with my cats during my move from Madison to San Francisco. But because my most powerful listening experiences with songs original to movies tend to come when I'm sitting in plush seats in some indistinguishable theater eating popcorn — an experience not at all unique for me — few of them have much staying power as songs that have already existed and are used in new and interesting ways.

Granted, if I bought and listened to more soundtrack albums I'd have more of my own memories to go with these original songs, but I'm afraid I typically don't give them a chance and thus have a hard time personalizing my own feelings about them. If I see a new song in a movie, I'm much more likely to track down an album with the song than a soundtrack. A case in point would be Stereo Total, whose cover of "Moviestar" was used effectively in The Tao of Steve. I bought the album with that track on it and now nearly all my associations with the song are listening to the CD while commuting from Berkeley to Santa Rosa for the two weeks after I got my current job but before I moved here.

Andy Ross | Point of Digression

I'm sorry to ask this as the conversation gets rolling, but what about Hedwig and the Angry Inch? That is one of the few soundtracks I have ever bought, and I think that almost every song works perfectly within the film and outside of it. In fact, I think they tell the story of the film in a new, equally intelligent way independent of the film.

Do they not count as original? What about past film musicals that started as stage productions? Have they never been nominated? If "Wicked Little Town" was eligible for Best Song and didn't get nominated, than that is another true tragedy of the year.

Sean Weitner | In which the writer reveals his soft spot for old rock 'n roll

You're exactly right. If it's been previously published or performed, particularly on the stage, it's ineligible. It's an imperial move on the Academy's part — "We only tolerate music that was commissioned by us!" — but at the same time, it's a safety measure. If you start dealing with songs that have their own pasts, as we've been discussing here ... it's just too emotional, and messy, because you'd have to start dealing with how the movie uses the song and not just the song itself. Otherwise, you could just stick "Maybelline" or "A Change is Gonna Come" or "She Loves You" in a movie and be a shoo-in for the awards.

Eric: I see how I was misunderstanding you. The original pop soundtrack for a non-musical film is usually just a desperate marketing ploy anyway.