The Best Song Podcast Jeff Commings

Only three songs were nominated for the Academy Award in 2008, the first time that had happened in 20 years. In this episode, we learn about the three songs, including two from prolific Bollywood composer A.R. Rahman that gave us some new sounds that had not been presented in Hollywood films. The other song gave Thomas Newman another chance to end his Oscar losing streak, thanks to his work on his second animated Pixar movie.

Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz monopolized the Original Song Oscar nominees for 2007, giving us three songs from their Disney musical Enchanted that paid homage to previous Disney classic songs and paid homage to them at the same time. Also nominated was a poignant song from a movie drawing from the Oliver Twist story, and a love song from a very low-budget Irish movie about two lost souls finding love through music. Learn more about these five songs and the people who created them on this episode!

Another film earned three Oscar nominations for original song, and this time it was the film adaptation of the Broadway smash musical Dreamgirls. Henry Krieger, the original composer of the stage show, enlisted new lyricists to work with him on the songs that impressed the Academy enough to get three into the list of five. Melissa Etheridge's history-making nomination as the first song to come from a documentary, and another nomination from Randy Newman made 2006 a very competitive year for the Original Song Oscar.

Only three songs were nominated by the Academy's music branch from 2005, perhaps signaling that the quality of songs was going downward sharply. But, maybe this marked just a blip in the movie music industry. Take a listen to the nominated songs and why the Academy only picked three in 2005.

Andrew Lloyd Webber finally got the movie version of The Phantom of the Opera into movie theaters, and got an Oscar nomination for putting an original song into the film. The other nominees for the 2004 Original Song Oscar included two songs not performed in English, the first time that had happened. But, more memorable about the year was who performed the majority of the songs at the Oscar ceremony. Learn all about it on this episode!

The Oscar nominees for 2003 featured a toe-tapping song from a groundbreaking animated movie, a sincere love song from a very funny mockumentary, and a song that closed out one of the most popular trilogies of all time. Two songs from the Civil War drama Cold Mountain were also in the mix, written by Sting and Elvis Costello. A year removed from the Oscar-winning "Lose Yourself," none of these songs were commercial hits, but they still made a big impact for their movies.