Billie Eilish and her brother, Finneas O'Connell, won the original song award at the 96th Academy Awards on Sunday night with “What Was I Made For?”, their existential sigh of a ballad. piano from Greta Gerwig's blockbuster “Barbie.”
The brothers' win, which followed a win in the same category in 2022 for their Bond theme from “No Time to Die,” made Eilish, 22, and O'Connell, 26, the youngest people to win a second Oscar, and the first songwriters since James Horner and Will Jennings to take home the Oscar for song with a song that also won song of the year at the Grammys. (Horner and Jennings did it with “My Heart Will Go On,” which Celine Dion sang in 1997’s “Titanic.”)
But if “What was I made for?” For weeks it had seemed like a safe haven at the Oscars, the brothers' performance of the song on Sunday's telecast faced stiff competition from performances of the other nominated songs, particularly the other one from “Barbie.” Here are the night's five original song performances, ranked from worst to best:
5. Jon Batiste, “It never went away”
Known to viewers as the former bandleader of Stephen Colbert's late-night show, the New Orleans-born Batiste is an awards season regular whose 2021 album “We Are” beat out much higher-profile LPs from artists like Taylor Swift and Olivia Rodrigo. He wins album of the year at the Grammys in 2022.
However, the composer and multi-instrumentalist was seriously outclassed here on a wobbly version of “It Never Went Away,” a maudlin love song he wrote with seasoned songwriter Dan Wilson for the documentary “American Symphony,” which follows Batiste as he balances the demands of his musical career in the face of his wife's fight against cancer. And whose idea was it to project images of random movie couples, including Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes in “Shakespeare in Love” and Jake Gyllenhaal and Heath Ledger in “Brokeback Mountain,” on a screen behind Batiste while he sang?
4. Becky G, “The Fire Within”
Flanked by a chorus of cute kids dressed in matching red and white outfits, the 27-year-old Inglewood native seemed to be on much firmer ground than Batiste as she performed this feel-good Latin pop number, or at least during a minute and a half. half, of Eva Longoria's film about the creation of Flamin' Hot Cheetos.
Still, “The Fire Inside” has to rank among the least inspired of the 15 (!) songs for which veteran tuner Diane Warren has been nominated without any awards. This woman wrote “How I Live” and “Because You Loved Me” and the immortal “I Don't Want to Miss a Thing”! Becky G needed something to work with.
3. Scott George and the Osage Singers, “Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People)”
Given Hollywood's recent penchant for mentioning that awards shows take place on the ancestral lands of the Tongva people, it was gratifying to see the Native Americans receive more than a self-congratulatory salute during Sunday's ceremony with this vivid rendition of the George's song in “Flower Moon Killers”.
As George and a group of men beat the beat on a large circular drum, cleverly filmed from above by Oscar cameras, dancers and singers dressed in traditional costumes moved around them with a surprising mix of determination and grace. Great reaction, too, from “Killers” star Lily Gladstone, who many expected her to win lead actress before losing to Emma Stone in “Poor Things.”
2. Billie Eilish and Finneas O'Connell, “What Was I Made For?”
Eilish and her brother worked on “What Was I Made For?” so hard during this awards cycle that the song's chords almost felt like an anticlimax when O'Connell started playing them once again on Sunday. But the finish line turned out to be a beautiful opportunity for Eilish to experiment with the song's melody, which she transformed into subtle new shapes in a series of agile vocal movements while O'Connell accompanied her on the piano, the two of them standing on a small rotating stage enveloped in an overwhelming abundance of pink.
Tender, knowing, in tune with youthful melodrama but wise beyond her years: every generation should be as lucky as Generation Z to have a standout singer like Eilish.
1. Ryan Gosling, “I'm Just Ken”
Will the singers perform Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt's power ballad “Barbie” decades from now as they do “The Way We Were” or “A Whole New World” (or even as they probably will with “What Was I Made For ?”)? Maybe, maybe not.
However, what “I'm Just Ken” lacks in terms of cinematic musical gravitas, Gosling more than made up for with rock star exuberance in a lavish production number that found him starting the song from his seat. in the audience: pink suit. , pink gloves and black sunglasses to match his black cowboy hat, before joining an army of several dozen Kens preening and twirling on the Oscars stage. Finally, Guns N' Roses' Slash even appeared to play an extended guitar solo as the crowd inside the Dolby Theater rose from their seats.
Vocally, Gosling was robust enough to make you remember his upbringing alongside Christina Aguilera and Justin Timberlake as a cast member of “Mickey Mouse Club” (and his secret history as a Silver Lake indie rocker with his band Dead Man's Bones). But what elevated “I'm Just Ken” was how willing he was to embody the spirit of his character all these months after he presumably left Ken behind.
