All Is Not Quite Love With Oscar’s Best Song Nominees

While there’s no pre-Oscar activity more cliché or pointless – besides pretending that they actually matter – than complaining about where the Academy missed the boat and got something wrong, please allow me a moment to complain about where the Academy missed the boat and got something wrong in 2010: the failure to nominate Karen O. and the Kids’ “All is Love” for Best Song…

The skittering, exuberant tune, from the Where the Wild Things Are soundtrack, is a buoyant slice of childlike glee married to the animalistic coos of Yeah Yeah Yeahs frontwoman Karen O.’s unhinged vocals, and acts as a rollicking mirror to the film that it helps to deepen.  Which, one assumes, are the qualifiers for a Best Song nominee: a track that stands not only as an excellent example of its genre (in this case, rock or indie-rock), but also serves to capture, reflect, and intensify the story and themes of the film that it is packaged with – all of which, in your humble Beatcraver’s opinion, “All is Love” so handily does. But scan the list of five Best Song nominees and, with few exceptions, you’ll find that to be a rather misguided assumption.

While the beautifully wasted country tune “The Weary Kind” by Ryan Bingham and T-Bone Burnett (from the film Crazy Heart) did make it to the top five (and, I’ll concede, probably is the song most deserving of an Oscar, even more so than “Love”) so did two –count ‘em, two — flat and meandering tunes from the usually far better Randy Newman, from the soundtrack to the inevitably-nominated Disney vehicle The Princess and the Frog.  And while fellow nominee “Loin De Paname” from Paris 36 is a lovely little bit of French-pop, the final song rounding out the nominations – “Take it All” from the turgid musical Nine – is a misguided slice of ‘meh’ from a cross-eyed remake of the immortal 8 ½.

So, what’s my point?  Pretty simple: a competition with a clear winner (“The Weary Kind”) amidst a sea of lightweights is not only boring, it’s insulting to the other artists (and art) that could have been included to make a far more interesting, and valid, competition of the true cream of the crop (see also: Bruce Springsteen’s achingly powerful “The Wrestler” not even getting a nod in 2008 to make room for a ‘Jai Ho” win from Slumdog Millionaire).

Had Karen O. and the Kids’ “All is Love” been nominated, along with, say, Jack White’s “Fly Farm Blues” from It Might Get Loud, a far more diverse – and, I’d argue, deserving – lineup of songs and artists would have made an Oscar category what it was originally intended to be: a competition of the absolute best of what cinema and music has to offer.  As it stands, the “Best Songs” to be decided upon this weekend contain one winner; the rest is Hollywood as usual.  The weary kind, indeed.

Note:  “All is Love” and “Fly Farm Blues” both made it into the 63-song Oscar shortlist of potential nominees, before being cut for the present top 5.