Listening to the songs that qualified for this year’s Oscars in the Best Original Song category put me in a bad mood.
A four-and-a-half hour playlist of mediocre music will do that to you, and that’s what the Oscar songs playlist has become in recent years. Despite a number of worthy songs each year, the majority of submissions are run-of-the-mill, with no real chance of making the cut with the Academy’s Music Branch.
And for four consecutive years now, the number of eligible songs has been in the 70s, with this year’s crop reaching 74.
The roster of songs clearly doesn’t have much to do with the best of what’s happening in popular music these days — and to be honest, these songs don’t have a lot to do with the best of what happened with music and cinema in 2015, either.