Rate-A-Record
How Do You Like These 5 Songs Nominated for an Oscar This Year?
A look at the 2024 Academy Award nominees for Best Original Song. Let us know how you like them!
The 96th Academy Awards will be taking place on Sunday, March 10, 2024. In addition to finding out who will win the ‘big’ awards, such as Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, and Best Director, I’m also very curious as to what song will win in the Best Original Song category.
The five nominees for the award come from the following films: The Fire Inside, Barbie, American Symphony, and Killers of the Flower Moon.
Although Barbie is the only one of those films that I’ve seen so far, I’ve listened to each of the Best Original Song nominees and I can see (or at least hear) why each of them was nominated.
I don’t think there’s one clear obvious ‘winner’ here. I think it’s going to be a very tough competition!
If you’re unfamiliar with the songs, below are official YouTube videos for each of them. For those of you who prefer audio-only versions of music, I’ve also included clips of each song from Spotify.
I’m curious to learn what you think of the nominees. Please let me know in the comments section!
As an alternative option for you, I’m also offering the five nominees as my newest entry in the long-running Rate-A-Record series here on Medium.
If you’re unfamiliar with Rate-A-Record, it was started a couple of years ago by writer Terry Barr. It was inspired by a segment on the old television series American Bandstand, in which host Dick Clark would present multiple songs and ask people rate to them on a scale between 35 (they hated it) to 98 (they couldn’t love it more.) Since Terry’s first Rate-A-Record post, there have been several dozen of them here by him, me, Paul Combs, Alex Markham, Arpad Nagy, Laura Lind, Francis B., Kerry Purvis, and many others. As a lifelong music lover, I think it’s a fun musical ‘game’ to play along with!
If you’d like to play along and rate each of the below songs using the 35–98 scale, that’s great. If not, that’s fine too. No pressure! I just hope you listen to the songs and enjoy some of them.
Here are the nominees for Best Original Song:
The Fire Inside (from Flamin’ Hot) — Music and lyrics by Diane Warren
I’m Just Ken (from Barbie)— Music and lyrics by Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt
It Never Went Away (from American Symphony) — Music and lyrics by Jon Batiste and Dan Wilson
Wahzhazhe — A Song For My People (from Killers of the Flower Moon) — Music and Lyrics by Scott George
What Was I Made For? (From Barbie) — Music and lyrics by Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell
I’m not going to give my own opinions and ratings of each of the Oscar-nominated songs here in the body of this post. However, if you’re interested in seeing what I think of each one, my ratings and thoughts will be in the comments section.
Let me know there how you like (or don’t like) the nominees — and maybe which one you’ll be rooting for to win at the Oscars!
Thank you for reading! If you’d like to connect with me outside of Medium, you can also find me on X, YouTube, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky, and Goodreads. I’m also the host of the GOTTA POP podcast. Links to all of those things can be found here.