Pharrell Williams, Kristen Wiig and More
When it comes to music at the movies in 2024, this might be remembered as the year of the weird musical – or, at least, the movies that you wouldn’t think would be musicals, but were. There was Todd Phillips’ sequel, “Joker: Folie a Deux,” which nobody figured would be full of musical numbers until it was; Joshua Oppenheimer’s “The End,” with post-apocalyptic underground crooning by Tilda Swinton and others; and, of course, Jacques Audiard’s “Emilia Pérez,” which sounded odd on paper – “a brutal Mexican cartel leader hires a high-powered attorney to engineer a gender-reassignment surgery” – even before you threw in lavish musical numbers.
But there were more traditional musicals, too: the smash hit “Wicked,” which reserved its new songs for Part 2 in 2025, along with “Moana 2,” “Mufasa: The Lion King,” and others.
And the year found lots of notable musicians writing songs for films, including Pharrell Williams and Elton John (with Brandi Carlile) writing new tunes for their own documentaries. Then there were Lady Gaga, Ed Sheeran, Miley Cyrus, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Sky Ferreira, Andrea Bocelli, Andra Day … and, oh yeah, Diane Warren, because they’d have to cancel Oscar season if Diane Warren didn’t have a song in the running.
This year’s field contains 89 qualifying songs, five fewer than last year. Here’s a roundup of some of this year’s notable contenders in the Best Original Song race, along with a “bonus tracks” sidebar of additional songs. Shortlist voting in the category will take place between Dec. 9 and 13, with a shortlist announced on Dec. 17.
“El Mal” and “Mi Camino” from “Emilia Pérez”
Songwriters: Clément Ducol and Camille
MOVIE “Emilia Pérez,” French director Jacques Audiard’s Spanish-language musical about a Mexican cartel leader (Karla Sofía Gascón) who enlists a high-powered lawyer (Zoe Saldaña) to help her undergo sex-reassignment surgery.
IF AT FIRST YOU DON’T SUCCEED… The song “El Mal” is set at a lavish black-tie dinner party, with Saldaña’s character, lawyer Rita Mora Castro, walking among all the motionless guests while she spits out a rap-style condemnation, accompanied by occasional operatic flights from the title character (Gascón). “From the start, Jacques had the idea of a dinner party with the jerks frozen and Rita pointing at them,” Camille said. “The difficult part was to find the right musical climate. We started with a blues protest song in the Bob Dylan style, but that was too literal. Then we tried a Talking Heads kind of song, but that was too ironic. Then we tried a groovy ’90s hip-hop style, but it was too relaxed and not tough enough. We needed something precise and straight to the point.
“We ended up with a version that was originally more electronic, but we made it raw after meeting Zoe. She allowed us to record with a live band and big, big energy, because she gives so much.”
MADE TO MEASURE “Mi Camino,” a statement of purpose for Selena Gomez’s character, was another example of the music shifting with the actress who would deliver it. “We had written a sort of waltz turning into a techno punk song for the bedroom scene, and then another, even punkier song,” Ducol said. “But Jacques met Selena and said, ‘Unfortunately, we have to throw away this song. It isn’t right for her. We need a song that tells the story of her as a woman looking for freedom.’ So we watched her documentary ‘My Mind & Me’ and felt immediately inspired.”
Camille added, “We wanted it to reconcile femininity and spirituality. She’s not looking for redemption, she’s looking for self-esteem.”
JACQUES SHOOTS, CLÉMENT SCORES “Mi Camino” was the last song to be written, but Clément still had to compose the film’s score, which made extensive use of wordless vocals sung by Camille. “There are three kinds of dimensions or layers to the vocal landscape of the film,” Ducol said. “There is the spoken dialogue and the songs embodied by the characters. And the third layer is voices that distance themselves from all of that and echo or resonate with the souls and emotions.”
“Piece by Piece” from “Piece by Piece”
Songwriter: Pharrell Williams
MOVIE Director Morgan Neville has made music documentaries before — “20 Feet From Stardom” and “The Music of Strangers,” among them — but he’s never made one like “Piece by Piece,” which charts Pharrell Williams’ career not through archival footage and modern interviews, but through reenactments and interviews done entirely with Lego characters.
COLOR FULL Williams said he wrote the title song to “Piece by Piece” in less than an hour, starting with the idea that it had to feel energetic, but also contain contrasts. “I wanted the verse to be dark and determined, and I wanted the chorus to be light and very rewarding in the way it paid off,” he said. Then he stopped and took another shot at describing what he was after. “I wanted it to be dark and stealth and black and navy blue, with a little bit of brown in there,” he said. “Like a black background with the vocals feeling very brown with accents of navy blue. That was the vibe for me.”
And does he always think of music that way, in colors? “That’s the only way that I know how to get around,” he said. “Some people identify it as music notes. I see it as colors.”
BLOCK PARTY Becoming the subject of a film meant that the songs he wrote for that film necessarily had to be introspective. But the form of that movie changed everything, in a way. “I know when people hear the word objectified, they usually think of the terrible experiences that our female siblings have had to endure,” he said. “But we actually used that word and flipped it on his head and used it in a positive way to objectify my story and my life — to Lego-fy everything.
“And when you do that, it makes it universal. Heavy things become easily digestible, and you see other things that are emotional, but it just hits differently when you see everything in Lego.”
MUSIC, MAESTRO Throughout his career, Williams has learned how valuable the synergy can be between song and film—most notably, perhaps, with the smash hit “Happy” from “Despicable Me 2.” “Music is the companion of a film, the companion of the integral moments of our lives,” he said. “Music is the soundtrack of your life, literally. You think about your first dance, your first kiss or the times you wanted a kiss and never got one—there’s always a song connected to it, whether it was good or bad or indifferent. As long as you have a memory and you have hearing, music is always going to be there.”
“Forbidden Road” from “Better Man”
Songwriters: Robbie Williams, Freddy Wexler and Sacha Skarbek
MOVIE Another film about a star named Williams that uses an unusual form to tell the story, “Better Man” is a fantasy-laced, music-driven biopic of the former Take That singer, a huge star in England. Oh, and it depicts Williams as a chimpanzee, a conceit director Michael Gracey hit upon when Williams described himself as a “performing monkey” onstage.
NOT OSCARY ENOUGH Almost 35 years after having his first hit with the boy band Take That, and 27 years after launching a solo career that would find him selling more than 20 million albums in the U.K. alone, Robbie Williams got his biopic. And though the movie is unconventional, there was never much question that “Better Man” would include a new Robbie Williams song. “Ooh, it would be a dreadful wasted opportunity for there not to be,” he said. “I’m writing all of the time and there’s seldom places for everything to go, so there’s good opportunity considering it’s a musical, which I’ve called actually an abuse-ical.”
But that doesn’t mean there weren’t rocky moments on the “Forbidden Road.” “I remember sending a song that I thought was suitable for the film a long time ago, and Michael Gracey going, ‘No, this isn’t an Oscar nominee vibe of a song.’ And I was thinking, ‘Well, f— you. It is.’ And then I heard about Eminem sending ‘Lose Yourself’ to the musical director or the director of ‘Eight Mile,’ and them saying, ‘This song isn’t good enough.’ And I was thinking, See? I’m right, he’s wrong.”
When he saw a full version of “Better Man,” though, he had a change of heart. “I saw the film and was like, ‘Oh, this makes sense. I went away with Freddy Wexler and we wrote ‘Forbidden Road.’”
TRANQUILITY BASE So how did he figure out that the movie needed a gentle, acoustic, introspective song that builds slowly? “Well, I was actually told what we needed to do by Michael Gracey,” he admitted with a grin. “He was like, ‘Look, the audience has been through a lot up to that point, and they’re gonna need a cuddle.’ And once he said that, it was like, ‘Oh, I get what you’re after now. So we set about, I dunno, making natural Xanax.”
ABOUT THAT OTHER SONG GRACEY DIDN’T LIKE… Williams, by the way, still remembers that first song he was sure would be right for the movie. “It was a very different approach,” he said. “It was a mixture of Matt Monro, “The Italian Job” and Neil Diamond in “The Jazz Singer.” And in the end, we went for a completely different approach. I still think the other song’s really, really good.”
A pause, and a grin. “As you can probably tell, I’m not quite over it.”
“Harper and Will Go West” from “Will & Harper”
Songwriters: Sean Douglas, Kristen Wiig and Josh Greenbaum
MOVIE Josh Greenbaum’s documentary follows a cross-country road trip undertaken by Will Ferrell and Harper Steele, one of Ferrell’s closest friends and a former “Saturday Night Live” head writer who recently came out as a trans woman.
MAKING A LIST AND CHECKING IT TWICE Early in the film, Ferrell and Steele call Kristen Wiig from their car, ask her to write a theme song for them and then give her all sorts of requirements: It should be jazzy but also have a country twang, it should be fun but it should make you cry… The bit was a gag but the call was real, and Wiig and Douglas thought about it.
“Throwing all these different styles at me, we were kind of like, ‘What should we do?’” Wiig said. “They listed every type of music that you could possibly imagine, and we talked about making that version. But then it would’ve been a crazy song that probably would’ve made everybody anxious. I’m proud of us for getting as many of them in as we did.”
INTO THE GROOVE Greenbaum was friends with Wiig and with Sean Douglas, a successful songwriter and producer. The collaboration, which largely took place over a day and also involved Greenbaum, was easy, Douglas said. “They said they wanted it to feel like a road thing, which meant it should feel kind of folky and upstrokey and have a little Appalachian thing going,” he said. “I was playing it on piano, which doesn’t sound the same, but we were just off and running on the idea. We had a certain groove going and the first couple of lines, and then everyone keeps developing it and passing the ball back and forth, and by the end of the day you’ve got a song.”
Those first few lines, by the way, definitely set the tone: “Harper and Will go west / Just a couple old friends and a couple brand new breasts.”
THE UNMASKED SINGER A couple of weeks after they wrote the song, they got back together to record it. “I sang as a kid and I was in the choir, but I wasn’t a confident singer,” Wiig said. “And a lot of the musical stuff I did, especially on ‘SNL,’ was more jokey — and it was a character singing, which is easier for me. When it’s me singing, I get nervous. It’s vulnerable. The film has resonated with so many people and I’m more comfortable with it now, but I’m still getting there.”
And if it gets a nomination, will she sing it on the Oscars? “Absolutely,” she said without hesitating. “That’s like a dream, right?”
“Kiss the Sky” from “The Wild Robot”
Songwriters: Maren Morris, Delacey, Jordan Johnson, Stefan Johnson, Michael Pollack & Ali Tamposi
MOVIE Chris Sanders’ animated epic is based on Peter Brown’s 2016 sci-fi novel for children, which tells the story of ROZZUM Unit 7134, or Roz, a futuristic robot who is programmed to be a helper, but accidentally becomes the guardian and surrogate mother to an orphaned goose.
CLUELESS Maren Morris had enjoyed a successful career as a Grammy-winning country singer and member of the all-female supergroup the Highwomen. But she hadn’t written for films when she was approached to write and record songs for the Dreamworks Animation project. “I truly had no idea what I was doing,” she said. “I just had to fake it and come from the place of, OK, this is about a robot that’s landed on this remote island and has to adapt really quickly into motherhood.”
With a son who was born in early 2020, that angle made sense to her. “I felt like I was right in that same seat, so I was able to come from that perspective.”
ACHIEVING LIFTOFF The song “Kiss the Sky” is heard during one of the film’s most spectacular sequences, when the timid young goose Brightbill overcomes his fear to join the rest of the flock as they take off on their massive migration. “With that scene of Brightbill taking flight and Roz realizing that this iteration of her journey has come to an end, I couldn’t help but think about my son going off to college. It makes me emotional to even talk about it now.”
BRINGING IT ALL BACK HOME After writing and recording the song about motherhood, Morris got to show “The Wild Robot” to the son who’d inspired it when she rented out a theater in Nashville in October. “He had seen the trailer on my phone 1,000 times and was already a fan, and he knew my song was in it,” she said. “It was my third or fourth time seeing the movie, but when you get to watch something that you’ve already seen with your child, it feels new because you’re watching it through their lens now.
“He was just in awe. But when my song kicked in and he heard my voice, he was like, ‘That’s you!’ It was so precious and really emotional, I’ll never forget it. I’ve never had a moment like that, and I don’t know if I ever will again.”
“Winter Coat” from “Blitz”
Songwriters: Steve McQueen, Nicholas Britell and Taura Stinson
MOVIE Steve McQueen’s drama looks at World War II through the viewpoint of a mother and son who are separated at a time when the Germans are raining bombs down on London.
THE NEW OLD SOUND The family at the center of “Blitz” is a single mother, Rita (Saoirse Ronan), her young son, George (Elliott Heffernan) and her father, Gerald (British rock icon Paul Weller in his first acting role), and the center of their family life is an upright piano on which Gerald is constantly playing the pop songs of the day. But McQueen enlisted composer Nicholas Britell, who had arranged period music for the director’s “12 Years a Slave,” to come up with some new songs that sounded old.
“He wanted songs that felt right for the period, that were really authentic to the world. But he also wanted to make sure the songs could speak to an audience today and feel impactful,” Britell said.
WHAT’S LEFT BEHIND For a song that Rita sings on the radio from the bomb factory where she works, McQueen began working with Britell. “He had this idea of when you’re missing somebody, an object could connect you to that person,” Britell said of the song that became “Winter Coat.” He brought in frequent collaborator Taura Stinson, who got it right away.
“In my family, when someone passes away, you either take something they left behind, or they’ve left something to you,” she said. “It was a sentiment I was all too familiar with: putting on someone’s coat, the scent, the memories, the warmth, all of those things that come with it.”
TIME TRAVEL “Our goal was to make it feel like these were songs that already existed in the world of these characters,” Britell said. He stayed away from harmonies that might feel too modern, while Stinson combed over old books of poems and consulted with her 95-year old grandmother, whose family is British. “The best compliment that I’ve received is the people who say, ‘We really thought that was a song from that area,’” Britell said.
Stinson agreed. “Yeah! When I was at Middleburg (Film Festival), someone told me, ‘Oh, I love that song! I remember that!’” She laughed. “I thought, Do you, now?”
“The Journey” from “The Six Triple Eight”
Songwriter: Diane Warren
MOVIE Tyler Perry’s Netflix movie is a World War II drama about the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion of the Women’s Army Corps, an American battalion that was sent overseas during the war.
YES, IT’S HER AGAIN Diane Warren has been nominated for 15 Oscars, including the last seven years in a row, and she’s the only songwriter to receive an Honorary Academy Award. And every year, she’s back in the race and back on the circuit, still looking for her first competitive win. It’s an interesting contradiction for a woman who’s well known for preferring to work by herself (no cowriters!) in quiet rooms.
“I’ve learned to enjoy it,” she said. “You’re right, I’m basically a hermit, just trying to wrestle with these songs to make them great. But I love this time of year. It’s a forced social life that I’ve learned to enjoy, but I don’t let anything get in the way of my writing. I make sure I write every day. If I have a piano, a guitar and a cat, I’m happy.”
EASY COME A friend of Warren’s first told her about “The Six Triple Eight,” describing the entire movie in such detail that Warren said she saw it in her head and for what she says was her first time ever, wrote a song for a movie without seeing any of the movie. “I was really touched and inspired by these women’s story. I sat down at the piano and started playing those chords, and all of a sudden I started singing, ‘It’s the journey/It’s the getting there to where you’re going to/Go through hell but still you’re gonna make it through.’ That kind of came with those chords.”
And while she doesn’t want to downplay the work she put into crafting the sultry slow-burn song, she also knows it came more easily than usual. “I’m a mad, crazy perfectionist with my songs,” she said, “but this one, I hate to say, almost wrote itself. I was watching on the sidelines going, ‘Well, OK, you’re writing that.’”
AND IT’S H.E.R. AGAIN, TOO Back in 2021, Warren appeared on TheWrap’s virtual music panel with H.E.R., among other songwriters with work in the race. “She beat me!” said Warren, whose song “Io sì (Seen)” from “The Life Ahead”lost to H.E.R.’s “Fight for You” from “Judas and the Black Messiah.” “But that’s OK. She’s great.”
She felt that again when H.E.R. came into the studio in Warren’s Hollywood office, listened to “The Journey” and then immediately arranged and recorded it the same day. “It was one of the best performances I’ve ever heard in my life,” she said. “I’ve worked with the best singers ever — Whitney and Celine and whoever. And she was on that level of performance. Where she went vocally was just astonishing to me.”
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Bonus Tracks
“Beyond” from “Moana 2“
Lin-Manuel Miranda landed an Oscar nomination for a song from the first “Moana” in 2016. Abigail Barlow and Emily Bear took over for the sequel, with their work including this driving Disney-princess statement of yearning. (Also submitted from the film: “Can I Get a Chee Ho?”
“I Always Wanted a Brother” and “Tell Me It’s You”from “Mufasa: The Lion King“
Miranda moved over to this Disney franchise that won Elton John an Oscar in its earliest incarnation. It gives him another chance to pick up the O he’s missing from an EGOT.
“Never Too Late” from “Elton John: Never Too Late“
Speaking of Elton John, he’s in the running for the second song he’s written with the title “Never Too Late” in the last five years. The first was written for the “live action” “Lion King” movie in 2019, while this one, with a nicely retro feel, is a collaboration with Brandi Carlile for the new documentary about his life and career.
“Under the Tree” from “That Christmas“
You wouldn’t necessarily think of Ed Sheeran as the guy to write a song for a movie starring grizzled heavyweights like Brian Cox and Bill Nighy — but if the movie is an animated one based on a book by the guy who wrote and directed “Love Actually,” and the song is a new Christmas song, why not?
“Sick in the Head” from “Kneecap“
The movie is an unruly, wildly fictionalized romp about the career of Irish hip-hop trio Kneecap, so of course the group offers its own driving statement of purpose: “I’m too far gone when it comes to mental health/Rather be sick in the head with a little bit of wealth.”
“Alone,” “The Big Blue Sky” and “Catch Fire” from “The End”
One of this year’s robust slate of musicals that you wouldn’t expect to be musicals, “The End” is a post-apocalyptic black comedy in which Tilda Swinton, George MacKay and others break into song awkwardly and endearingly.
“Out of Oklahoma” from “Twisters“
A couple of songs are eligible from “Twisters,” including this affecting country ballad sung by Lainey Wilson and written by Wilson, Luke Dick and Shane McAnally. (Luke Combs also has a song in the running, “Ain’t No Love in Oklahoma.”)
“Not My Fault” from “Mean Girls“
There are eight credited songwriters on this spirited pop/hip-hop ditty, among them performers Megan Thee Stallion and Reneé Rapp and singer-songwriter-producer Ryan Tedder. (That’s too many under Academy rules.)
“Leash” from “Babygirl“
A provocative Nicole Kidman movie gets a provocative, tunefully assaultive end-credits song from Sky Ferreira.
“Beautiful That Way” from “The Last Showgirl“
For a film starring Pamela Anderson, an actress long dismissed as a lightweight, it makes sense to commission a song from Miley Cyrus, who has had her own experience being underestimated.
“Folie À Deux” from “Joker: Folie à Deux“
In between the old standards like “For Once in My Life,” “That’s Entertainment” and “I’ve Got the World on a String,” Lady Gaga whipped up a waltz that sounds as if it came from another time, or maybe another mental state.
“Why I’m Here” from “Shirley“
The surprise 2023 Grammy winner for Best New Artist, Tamara Joy, downplays her jazz roots for this dignified anthem celebrating the pioneering Black politician Shirley Chisholm.
“Compress/Repress” from “Challengers“
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross have two Oscar wins and three nominations for their work as composers, but they have yet to be nominated for one of their movie songs. This piece of electronica, both stately and jittery, includes a vocal appearance by Reznor’s wife, Mariqueen Maandig.
“Dare to Be” from “Cabrini“
This period drama about a female Catholic missionary in the late 1800s is another family affair: Andrea Bocelli sings the big, stately ballad in Italian, and his daughter Virginia chimes in in English.
This story first appeared in the Race Begins issue of TheWrap’s awards magazine. Read more from the issue here.
