Academy Award for Best Original Song
| Academy Award for Best Original Song | |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Presented by | Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) |
| First awarded | 1934 |
| Currently held by |
Jimmy Napes Sam Smith “Writing's on the Wall” (2015) |
| Official website | oscars |
The Academy Award for Best Original Song is one of the awards given annually to people working in the motion picture industry by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS). It is presented to the songwriters who have composed the best original song written specifically for a film. The performers of a song are not credited with the Academy Award unless they contributed either to music, lyrics or both in their own right.
The award category was introduced at the 7th Academy Awards, the ceremony honoring the best in film for 1934. Nominations are made by Academy members who are songwriters and composers, and the winners are chosen by the Academy membership as a whole.
"There must be a clearly audible, intelligible, substantive rendition (not necessarily visually presented) of both lyrics and melody, used in the body of the motion picture or as the first music cue in the end credits."
The original requirement was only that the nominated song appear in a motion picture during the previous year. This rule was changed after the 1941 Academy Awards, when "The Last Time I Saw Paris", from the film Lady Be Good, with music by Jerome Kern and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, won. Kern was upset that his song won because it had been published and recorded before it was used in the film. The song was actually written in 1940, after the Germans occupied Paris at the start of World War II. It was recorded by Kate Smith and peaked at No. 8 on the best seller list before it was used in the film.
Kern got the Academy to change the rule so that only songs that are "original and written specifically for the motion picture" are eligible to win. Songs that rely on sampled or reworked material along with cover versions, remixes and parodies, such as "Gangsta's Paradise" in the 1995 film Dangerous Minds, are also ineligible.
This rule means that when a film is adapted from a previously-produced stage musical, none of the existing songs from the musical are eligible. As a result, many recent film adaptations of musicals have included original songs which could be nominated, such as "You Must Love Me" in the 1996 film Evita, and "Listen", "Love You I Do", "Patience" in the 2006 film Dreamgirls and "Suddenly" in the 2012 film Les Misérables.
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