The Agony, Absurdity and Ecstasy of the Oscar for Best Song

Sufjan Stevens has never owned a tuxedo, or worn one, or wanted to. He’s not sure how the walk on the red carpet actually works. But that’s soon to change, all because the Italian director, Luca Guadagnino, came knocking in 2015, and asked Stevens, a whispery balladeer who likes to wear giant angel wings onstage, to write a song for his film “Call Me by Your Name.”

Stevens had long resisted writing music for the screen, but Guadagnino is his kind of aesthete, so Stevens said yes. He ended up writing two songs, including “Mystery of Love,” which, to Stevens’ lasting astonishment, landed an Oscar nomination for best song.

“It’s a huge honor they’ve decided to acknowledge something expressed in a very still, small voice,” said Stevens, speaking by phone this past weekend, “It’s so absurd that I’m a part of all this at all.”

The best song Oscars category has always been a curious creature, a mash-up of hits, snoozers and misfires, and a munificent source of Academy Awards moments that can astonish, or bore, or mortify. There was the time when only two songs were nominated. Or when the gangsta rappers, and Oscar nominees, Three 6 Mafia, sang about pimps and hoes before the black-tie audience, hardly their usual crowd, and then, fantastically, won. Or in 1985, when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences wouldn’t let Phil Collins perform “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now),” because he wasn’t a movie person, or something, and instead had Ann Reinking lip sync to her prerecorded version of it and dance through clouds of dry ice, as people in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Collins among them, died a little inside.

The randomness of the category is the nature of the beast. Unlike original scores, which have seen partnerships both storied and fresh — Steven Spielberg and John Williams, David Fincher and Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, Paul Thomas Anderson and Jonny Greenwood, and now Ryan Coogler and Kendrick Lamar — songs are often tasked with providing emotional parting memories to audiences as the credits roll.

This year’s batch of nominations contains names familiar to any Oscar devotee, and the writers of three of the five songs are repeat nominees. But there are first timers other than Stevens as well: Mary J. Blige, Raphael Saadiq and Taura Stinson are up for “Mighty River,” from “Mudbound.” Also, in what is possibly an Oscars first, members of one team of writers are up against their former babysitter.

I asked the songwriters about the impact of the nominations, and how they went about writing songs for the screen. First and foremost, they all said landing an Oscar nomination was obviously a good thing.

“Being in this conversation of course broadens the horizons,” Blige, who is the first person to earn Oscar nominations for songwriting and acting in the same year, wrote in an email. “Just like a Grammy, it elevates the game.”

But several songwriters noted that an award as the end goal could have a poisoning effect.

Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who collected the best song Oscar last year for “City of Stars,” from “La La Land,” have found themselves nominated again this year, for “This Is Me,” a chart topper and Golden Globe winner sung by Keala Settle in “The Greatest Showman.”

Pasek said the recognition helped counterbalance the often torturous process of songwriting. “There are so many dark, dreary days where you feel incredibly inadequate, and completely lost,” he said. “People you look up to or inspire you, a community of artists that you listen to and draw inspiration from, are saying, ‘Keep going.'”

But, Paul added, the pair didn’t necessarily view it as a stamp of “now we’re really good.”

“We all know people who have won awards who have gone on to make terrible things, and people who’ve never won an award who’ve done great things,” he said.

Pasek, as it happened, used to babysit for Kristen Anderson-Lopez and her husband, Robert Lopez, who are up for the tender ballad “Remember Me,” from the Oscar-nominated “Coco,” the Pixar animated film about Mexican family life and folklore (both the film and the song are favorites in their respective categories).

“Such a sweet and warm guy,” Lopez wrote in a text, of Pasek. “We’d use him again, though I think he’s busy.”

The Lopezes are Oscar winners, too, having gifted the world with “Let It Go,” one of the most ubiquitous songs of 2014. (The artist who sang that, Idina Menzel, had her name gloriously mangled by John Travolta at that year’s Oscars, where he introduced her as “Adele Dazeem.”)

Anderson-Lopez said “Remember Me” was born partly out of parental guilt. Working in the music industry often takes her and Lopez away from their two daughters, so she leaves them with personalized lullabies that she has their babysitters sing. Lopez also sang it at his mother’s funeral in August.

“I don’t know how I made it through,” he said. The couple said having their first Oscar nomination, and win, behind them has let them breathe easier this awards season. In 2014, they found themselves “in a constant state of fight or flight,” Anderson-Lopez said. This year’s ceremony will also be a break from their work in New York, where they are preparing “Frozen” for Broadway.

“Writing for the screen, you don’t have to think about applause moments,” Anderson-Lopez said of the stage adaptation.

“Remember Me” was also deeply personal for its Grammy-winning singers, Miguel, whose father is Mexican, and the pop star Natalia LaFourcade, who is from Mexico City.

“On a political, cultural side, a movie like this has great timing,” Miguel said.

LaFourcade said the movie, and song, gave her country a much-needed boost.

“Especially being next to the States, it’s very important, and a reminder of so many good things we have,” she said.

“Stand Up for Something,” from “Marshall,” a film about the first African-American Supreme Court justice, was written by Diane Warren, who’s on her ninth Oscar nomination, and Common, who, along with John Legend, won the category three years ago for “Glory.”

Common said his first round of movie awards attention gave him access to power players he had never before known, like Starbucks executive Howard Schultz, with whom he ended up partnering on a jobs initiative in Chicago.

Warren said she had always known she wanted to work with Common on the song, which he performed with the singer Andra Day, but didn’t pop the question until she found herself sitting alongside him on a plane trip to Sundance.

“It’s probably the most important song I’ve ever done,” she said. “People are more likely to call you, any success you have,” Warren said. “The fact that you’re chosen out of hundreds of nominated songs is quite an honor. That being said, it would be nice to win.”

Stevens remains a little baffled by his nomination, and the intensity of being part of an awards campaign. A staunchly independent and autonomous songwriter, he’s had little exposure to the entertainment industry complex, and “Call Me by Your Name,” which is also a best picture contender, is distributed by Sony Pictures Classics, a division of Sony Pictures Entertainment.

The song he is nominated for also wasn’t even the first one he penned for the film; that was “Visions of Gideon,” which he describes as “entrenched in sorrow, a moment of realizing and resignation, and a bit of a downer when you’re up against Pixar.” So, he said, he understood why “Mystery of Love” was instead used in the film’s awards campaign.

As for the Oscar night tuxedo, Stevens has a pretty sweet connection. He’ll be wearing Gucci, he said, because “Luca is close with the Gucci people because he lives near Milan.” To be determined: whether he’ll accessorize with wings.