Oscars goes country

The 82nd Academy Awards chose The Weary Kind by T-Bone Burnnett and Ryan Bingham as winners in the Best Song Written for a Motion Picture category. This was used in the Jeff Bridges starrer Crazy Heart. It is the 76th Best Song winner, a feat made memorable by the fact that this year marks the 75th anniversary of the category, which was added to the annual award giving in 1934 by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. This is the reason why the orchestra was playing winning songs in the background during the ceremonies last Sunday evening or Monday morning, our time. The first one to win the trophy was the dance tune The Continental from The Gay Divorcee.

Take note that this year was also only the fifth time the Academy honored a country song with an Oscar. You can say fifth, if you choose to classify the likes of High Noon by Dimitri Tiomkin in 1952 from High Noon starring Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly, Secret Love by Sammy Fain in 1953 from Calamity Jane with Doris Day and Howard Keel and Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head by Hal David and Burt Bacharach from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with Paul Newman and Robert Redford as country songs.

These songs all come from films with a Western setting. That, however, is the only reason why you can classify them as country. Take that away and what you have are regular pop songs, although all three turned out very popular choices. Otherwise, this is only the second time that the Oscars gave the award to a country song. The first time was in 1975 for I’m Easy, composed and performed by actor Keith Carradine in the movie Nashville.

No word or place personifies country music better than Nashville, the Tennessee City acknowledged as the seat of country music. The rule is you are no country music artist if you cannot make it in Nashville. That is where all the big ones are from or where they go to make music. And the line-up goes from Johnny Cash to Willie Nelson to Keith Urban and Rascal Flatts. Thanks to Elvis Presley, country music also rocks nowadays and because of Ray Charles, the music now has a very strong R&B element.

However, what was honored at the Oscars was a real country song of the old-time sort. The Weary Kind is sad and lonely and smacks of long, drunken nights in bars, many broken hearts on the road and a pained look at tomorrow. There are more of the same in the soundtrack album which mixes big Hollywood names with country music royalty. Now, although Pinoys like listening to Help Me Make It Through The Night and The Gambler we have never been really keen on country music unless it is the Taylor Swift variety. But because Crazy Heart is so affecting, we can listen to the soundtrack feeling as though we have always liked country music.

Lead actor Jeff Bridges, who won his first Academy Award for his performance in Crazy Heart is also lead star of the CD. Like his acting, it is a solid performance of somebody who might have made and lost success in Nashville. He sounds hoarse and craggy like the down and out country songwriter he plays. Where is the heartthrob Michelle Pfeiffer fell for in The Fabulous Baker Boys? He has gone off to join the acting greats and we are all happy for him. Bridges’ contributions to the soundtrack are Hold On You, Somebody Else, Fallin’ & Flyin’, I Don’t Know and Brand New Angel.

 Colin Farrell also makes his singing debut in Crazy Heart and does quite well solo with Gone, Gone Gone and in a duet of Fallin’ & Flyin’ with Bridges. Actors Robert Duvall who got his chance to do country songs in his Oscar-winning turn in Tender Mercies sings Live Forever a cappella and Sam Phillips does Reflecting Light. The rest are old and new tunes sang by some of country music’s biggest names. Buck Owens, The Louvin Brothers, Lightnin’ Hopkins Waylon Jennings, Townes Van Zandt and Bingham himself who sings I Don’t Know and the now Academy Award-winning The Weary Kind.

This year’s other Best Song nominees are: Almost There by Academy Award-winning composer Randy Newman from the animated feature The Princess And The Frog; Down In New Orleans also by Newman from the same picture; Loin De Paname from Paris 36 by Reinhardt Wagner and Frank Thomas; and Take It All by Maury Yeston and performed by Academy Award-winning actress Marion Cotillard in Nine.