Do Oscars Need an Additional Music Category?

Music Oscars

By Steven Rosen

Crazy Heart features a powerful, evocative composition that seems likely to be recognized during movie awards season – its “The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart),” by Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett, is a strong candidate for an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Song.

But, really, the whole mix of music assembled for the film’s soundtrack by Burnett and the late Stephen Bruton is effective. It uses, for instance, Townes Van Zandt’s “If I Needed You,” Sam Phillips’ “Reflecting Light” – even a snatch of co-star/producer Robert Duvall singing Billy Joe Shaver’s “Live Forever.”

So why not Oscar consideration for its overall soundtrack? Actually, there are those who actively work in finding existing pop songs – source material – for movies wish the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences would do so with a new Oscar category.

The Academy has three Oscar music categories – Original Song, Original Score and Original Musical. In the past, it has had other categories – Prince won an Original Song Score Oscar for 1984’s Purple Rain – but they have all honored music made with the film in mind.

Yet The Graduate, way back in 1967, changed movie music forever by using pre-existing Simon & Garfunkel songs. One of the classics of modern American cinema, it has a traditional score of sorts – Dave Grusin wrote instrumental passages that evoke the lifestyle of the upper-middle-class California adults young Benjamin Braddock was rebelling against.

But Grusin isn’t thought of as the film’s primary musical auteur. That honor has always gone to Paul Simon, who allowed director Mike Nichols to evocatively use several existing songs in the film, especially “Sounds of Silence” and “Scarborough Fair.” But Simon wasn’t even nominated for an Oscar. (While The Graduate was the origin of “Mrs. Robinson,” only snatches were actually used in the film – Simon hadn’t written the verses yet.)

But ever since, movies have used source material – especially older rock and pop songs – to help convey the emotional tenor of individual scenes.

“Most of us hear source music and it already has power from how its been assimilated into our lives,” says Joe Henry, the singer-songwriter who has worked on music for movies in several different capacities, from producing cover versions of Bob Dylan songs for I’m Not There and writing for Knocked Up with Loudon Wainwright III, to composing the score for the upcoming film Motherhood.

“It’s like hiring a particular actor, say Jimmy Stewart,” Henry says. “You didn’t have to do a lot of work to prove your character was a good guy. It’s telegraphed instantly by his presence.

“Music wasn’t used that way in the early days of the Academy,” he says. “But it has slowly found purpose as a significant way to aid storytelling. To not have a way of acknowledging that when appropriate is like not acknowledging an editor or a light designer.”

It’s an interesting question, concedes Bruce Davis, executive director of the Academy. But he doesn’t expect a change anytime soon. “It is undeniable that preexisting music has made very effective contributions to many pictures over the years, but that’s not what we do at the Academy,” he explains.

“The Oscars are about the creating of stuff,” he says. “I know a score completely made up of preexisting music has a creative aspect to it, but there’s nobody writing the music and that’s what we focus on.”

Randall Poster, who supervised the selection of Dylan covers for Todd Haynes’ I’m Not There, believes the work deserves award consideration. “It was a monumental task because we were dealing with one of the greatest icons in pop culture,” Poster says. “It would be nice if somehow, someway, there was an acknowledgement of the best musical element in a movie,” he says.

Crazy Heart’s Burnett, who produced the soundtrack of mostly new recordings of American traditional music for O Brother Where Art Thou? that garnered five Grammys, is more cautious. He says he understands that the Academy needs first and foremost to keep the Oscar for Best Score “pure” – meaning it’s a “substantial body of music that serves as original dramatic underscoring,” according to Academy regulations.

“Maybe there could be a couple more music categories, but it doesn’t feel like the Oscars are short of categories,” he says. “The reality is you write these songs and people carry them in their hearts. That’s about as far as you can go with it.”

(This ran in the March, 2010, issue of American Songwriter)

(Photo of T-Bone Burnett)

Honoring a Great Performance as a Country Singer

Everywhere you look these days, people are honoring the greatest movies of all time.

There are books, newspaper columns, video-store racks, film series and American Film Institute-sponsored television shows devoted to the task. This is, by and large, a good thing - especially if it encourages film revivals and restorations.

But beyond the canonical Great Movies are the "lost movies." They aren't the well-known masterpieces. They aren't perfect; sometimes they have flaws. And they have been forgotten and overlooked, often from the day they were released. But they are exciting, influential, risky and different - maybe too different - for their times.

Every now and then, I'd like to call attention to such deserving lost movies. And for the first, I've picked 1973's "Payday." It was released during an era brimming with challenging movies full of point-of-view and personality. Many became hits (and classics) - "The Godfather," "Chinatown," "Dog Day Afternoon," "Last Tango in Paris." But there were more good films than even the most curious and receptive of audiences could handle, and some fine ones fell by the wayside.

"Payday" was one. It stars Rip Torn in probably his best role ever, as reprobate country singer Maury Dann. The film is directed succinctly by Daryl Duke and written by Don Carpenter. And its producers are Saul Zaentz, the owner of Fantasy Records who later made "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" and "The English Patient,"
and partner/music critic Ralph J. Gleason.

Torn once was considered as powerful and electrifying an actor as Jack Nicholson. In fact, he was scheduled to play the "Easy Rider" lawyer role that provided Nicholson with his breakthrough.

One wonders if Nicholson was first offered Torn's role in "Payday" as struggling, minor-league country singer Dann. Torn looks a little beefier and bulkier, a little more dangerous, than Nicholson, but they both exude the same kind of gleefully macho, killer-smile self-assuredness.

When "Payday" came out, country music was four-square and patriotic. It also wasn't as fashionable as it is now, when older and/or rootsier performers grow desperate trying to get airplay in a world of more polished, showbiz-schooled acts.

So this intensely critical portrait of Maury and his milieu seemed a stretch. (A very different kind of film, "This Is Spinal Tap," had problems getting audiences to believe its premise of aging metal bands playing well past their prime.)

It also seemed as if Bay area hipsters - Fantasy Records had been home to Lenny Bruce and Creedence Clearwater Revival; Gleason was associated with Rolling Stone magazine - were making fun of country.

Now, after a couple of generations of "outlaw" country singers and their rise and fall, as well as the growth in knowledge of Hank Williams' life, "Payday" seems extremely honest and true to its character.

And it is a devastating character study, following Maury for the last three days of his life. He plays a small-club date, visits his pill-addicted mom, goes hunting, suffers through a visit with a weaselly deejay, seduces a young woman in his car, violently breaks up with his older girlfriend Mayleen (Ahna Capri) to carry on with a younger one (Elayne Heilveil), fights with and fires a key band member, and kills a man who challenges him to a fight.

Yet he's also irresistible and bullishly charming in his slovenly, cocky, down-home way - he sits on the toilet with the door open to shock people. You also feel sympathy for his neediness and insecurity; he is dependent on his tough manager (Michael C. Gwynne) to help him negotiate life.

Writer Carpenter sees Maury as a guy still searching for his big hit (his latest LP is called "Payday"). I prefer to view him as a guy past his last hit, who doesn't yet know it. Or maybe he just can't admit it.

In a haunting and unforgettable scene reminiscent of Ed Harris' demise in "Pollock," he dies while speeding with an unwilling passenger in the back seat of his white Cadillac. It's a true death's-head vision - while warbling "She's Only a Country Girl" (a Shel Silverstein song), his eyes bulge and he gives out a short, quick gasp.

Watching "Payday" again recently, I tried to recall another character as compelling as Torn's Maury Dann, as repellent yet also alluring, as frightening yet also appealing, as sexy yet not conventionally handsome.

Then it hit me - Tony Soprano.

By Steven Rosen

(This originally ran in The Denver Post in 2001, before Torn's great performance in "Forty Shades of Blue.")