What are the best and worst Best Original Songs in Oscars history?

ByWalt Hickey FiveThirtyEight logo
Friday, March 2, 2018
(Silver Screen Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
Silver Screen Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

This post originally appeared on FiveThirtyEight and is reprinted with permission.

The Academy Awards strive to highlight the most significant annual achievements in acting, the craft of making movies and, for some reason, which song from the last year was pretty good. Yes, the Oscar for best original song is a chance to look back on the small batch of tunes explicitly written for the medium of film. But that's the problem; it's a relatively small batch compared with the almost endless number of movies and actors the academy can choose from. It's not a recipe for consistent excellence.

There are a few kinds of songs that show up repeatedly over the years. You've got the mediocre song added to the film adaptation of a beloved stage musical;(1) one of the Disney, Pixar or Bond songs; or the song that wins but isn't even the best tune from that movie.(2) There are many years when the obviously superior song - "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing," "The Power of Love," "Eye of the Tiger" or "The Bare Necessities" - loses. My favorite nominees of all are the C to C-minus ballads from extremely popular musicians grasping their best chance to win Oscar gold, such as Bono,(3) Paul McCartney,(4) Bruce Springsteen,(5) Jon Bon Jovi,(6) Justin Timberlake(7) or, most of all, Sting.(8)

In other words, I find the best original song category fascinating because its nominees span such a wide range in quality - the most timeless songs in cinema history and songs that prove the music branch will nominate a ham sandwich if Bono or Randy Newman was involved in making it.

So let's find out the worst best original song. (OK, we'll find the best one too.) We took a 30-second clip from every best original song winner in Academy Award history and loaded the samples into a random matchup generator. Then we asked people to select which song they preferred. We promoted this across FiveThirtyEight's social channels over several weeks. It's not a scientific sample, but with more than 50,000 individual matchups evaluated, I'm confident that this ranking approximates prevailing attitudes toward the winners.(9) We can then rank each song by the percent of matchups it won.

I was originally worried that the biases of the audience would penalize older songs over more recent songs, but that wasn't the case; more to the point, it appears that we're in a bit of a dark age when it comes to movie songs.

The best era for movie songs appears to be the 1980s and 1990s - bracketed by "Fame" in 1980 and "My Heart Will Go On" in 1997. The best 10 consecutive years of best original songs ran from 1986 through 1995, with Disney Renaissance hits combining with bangers like "Take My Breath Away" from "Top Gun" and "Time of My Life" from "Dirty Dancing" to make for an unmatched stretch of good winners.(10)

But which individual songs could be called the best or worst? At the bottom of the pile, there's "Sweet Leilani" in 1937, "Buttons and Bows" in 1948 and "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe" in 1946 (which Judy Garland sang). The worst performing songs of the past 20 years were "I Need to Wake Up" from "An Inconvenient Truth" (2006) and "Man or Muppet" from "The Muppets" (2011).

There's a large clump of songs that won around 70 percent of their matchups, give or take 3 percentage points. Call this the great-but-not-best cluster. Then there's a gap before you get to the truly differentiated tunes. The fourth- and third-ranked songs - "Flashdance (What a Feeling)" from "Flashdance" (1983) and "Can You Feel the Love Tonight" from "The Lion King" (1994), respectively - both won 77 percent of their matchups. The No. 2 song, "When You Wish Upon a Star" from "Pinocchio" (1940), won 80 percent.

But they're no match for the best best original song of all time: Judy Garland's rendition of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," from 1939's "The Wizard of Oz," won 91 percent of its matchups. That's head and shoulders over the competition.

What's the best best original song?

Oscar-winning songs and this year's nominees by win percentage in a random matchup simulation

1. "Somewhere Over the Rainbow," 1939, won 91 percent of matchups

2. "When You Wish Upon a Star," 1940, 80% win

3. "Can You Feel the Love Tonight," 1994, 77% win

3. "Flashdance (What a Feeling)," 1983, 77% win

5. "The Way You Look Tonight," 1936, 73% win

6. "Fame," 1980, 71% win

6. "Lose Yourself," 2002, 71% win

6. "Rain Drops Keep Falling on My Head," 1969, 71% win

9. "White Christmas," 1942, 70% win

10. "My Heart Will Go On," 1997, 69% win

10. "Que Sera Sera," 1956, 69% win

10. "Under the Sea," 1989, 69% win

13. "A Whole New World," 1992, 6% win

13. "Let It Go," 2013, 68% win

13. "Moon River," 1961, 68% win

13. "Time of My Life," 1987, 68% win

17. "Take My Breath Away," 1986, 67% win

18. "Beauty and the Beast," 1991, 66% win

18. "Skyfall," 2012, 66% win

20. "Colours of the Wind," 1995, 65% win

21. "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah," 1947, 64% win

22. "Streets of Philadelphia," 1993, 63% win

22. "Theme From Shaft," 1971, 63% win

24. "The Way We Were," 1973, 62% win

25. "Last Dance," 1978, 61% win

26. "Chim Chim Cher-ee," 1964, 60% win

27. "Glory," 2014, 59% win

28. "Baby, It's Cold Outside," 1949, 57% win

29. "Falling Slowly," 2007, 54% win

29. "Up Where We Belong," 1982, 54% win

29. "You'll Be in My Heart," 1999, 54% win

32."I Just Called to Say I Love You," 1984, 53% win

33. "All the Way," 1957, 52% win

33. "Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)," 1981, 52% win

35. "Born Free," 1966, 50% win

35. "Swinging on a Star," 1944, 50% win

37. "High Hopes," 1959, 49% win

37. "I'm Easy," 1975, 49% win

39. "Jai Ho," 2008, 48% win

39. "Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing," 1955, 48% win

41. "Mona Lisa," 1950, 46% win

41. "You Light Up My Life," 1977, 46% win

42. "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp," 2005, 45% win

42. "Sooner or Later," 1990, 45% win

42. "The Windmills of Your Mind," 1968, 45% win

42. "Things Have Changed," 2000, 45% win

47. "City of Stars," 2016, 44% win

47. "If I Didn't Have You," 2001, 44% win

47. "Remember Me," 2017, 44% win

47. "Thanks for the Memory," 1938, 44% win

51. "Call Me Irresponsible," 1963, 43% win

51. "Say You, Say Me," 1985, 43% win

51. "The Morning After," 1972, 43% win

54. "The Weary Kind," 2009, 42% win

54. "We May Never Love Like This Again," 1974 42% win

54. "Writing's on the Wall," 2015, 42% win

57. "Al Otro Lado del Rio," 2004, 41% win

57. "Into the West," 2003, 41% win

58. "Evergreen (Love Theme From A Star Is Born)," 1976, 40% win

58. "We Belong Together," 2010, 40% win

58. "When You Believe," 1998, 40% win

62. "Days of Wine and Roses," 1962, 38% win

62. "It Goes Like It Goes," 1979, 38% win

62. "Let the River Run," 1988, 38% win

62. "Lullaby of Broadway," 1935, 38% win

62. "Three Coins in the Fountain," 1954, 38% win

62. "You'll Never Know," 1943, 38% win

68. "Gigi," 1958, 37% win

68. "It Might as Well Be Spring," 1945, 37% win

68. "Stand Up for Something," 2017, 37% win

71. "For All We Know," 1970, 36% win

71. "Man or Muppet," 2011, 36% win

71. "Secret Love," 1953, 36% win

74. "Mystery of Love," 2017, 35% win

74. "Talk to the Animals," 1967, 35% win

74. "This Is Me," 2017, 35% win

77. "Never on Sunday," 1960, 34% win

78. "The Shadow of Your Smile," 1965, 33% win

79. "You Must Love Me," 1996, 33% win

80. "The Last Time I Saw Paris," 1941, 32% win

81. "The Ballad of High Noon," 1952, 31% win

81. "The Continental," 1934, 31% win

83. "Cool Cool Cool of the Evening," 1951, 30% win

83. "Mighty River," 2017, 30% win

85. "I Need to Wake Up," 2006, 29% win

86. "On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe," 1946, 28% win

87. "Buttons and Bows," 1948, 22% win

87. "Sweet Leilani," 1937, 22% win

Footnotes:

1. "Suddenly" from "Les Miserables," "Learn to Be Lonely" from "The Phantom of the Opera," "I Move On" from "Chicago," "Hopelessly Devoted to You" from "Grease" and "Mean Green Mother From Outer Space" from "Little Shop of Horrors."

2. Looking at you, "La La Land."

3. "The Hands That Built America"

4. "Vanilla Sky"

5. "Dead Man Walkin'," and "Streets of Philadelphia"

6. "Blaze of Glory"

7. "Can't Stop the Feeling"

8. "My Funny Friend and Me," "Until," "You Will Be My Ain True Love" and "The Empty Chair"

9. Among our readers, at least.

10. Note: FiveThirtyEight is owned by ESPN, which is partially owned by Disney.