by Chris Feil
Aren’t we all happy now that the Best Original Song nominees are staying on the ceremony? Now that the uproar is settling, perhaps it’s a safe time to reflect on why removing them from the telecast never should have been up for debate. What better example of music’s inextricability from the movies and their intertwined cultural impact than Titanic?
“My Heart Will Go On” was its own inescapable beast in 1997 aside from Titanic itself, the dominance of the film and song fueling each other’s fire in tandem...
Céline Dion was the queen of the mid-90s love song, but this became her magnum opus, a ballad to match the massive emotions in James Cameron’s spectacle. Like the film, it suffused melodrama with enough mortality to snatch right for our tearducts.
You can’t think of Titanic without summoning its melody. Imagine suggesting that it isn’t essential to the film, that its Oscar ceremony could be complete without it.
The now-reversed decision to gut the ceremony was met with vitriol, particularly the first confirmation of the categories to be jettisoned to commercial breaks. But not including the nominated songs was just as much a slap to the ceremony’s history of celebrating the breadth of the moviegoing experience. If not as fundamental to cinema as cinematography and editing (like filmmakers such as Cuarón decried), music is still as essential to our experience. It’s the tears we cry, the joy we feel, and especially in Titanic’s case, it was a song to carry with us so we could stay under the film’s timeless romantic spell.
Could you consider this song a behemoth of its year to match this year’s “Shallow”? Frankly, “Shallow” wishes. But it’s not difficult to imagine Céline Dion having the kind of clout in 1997 to give the producer an ultimatum that if her co-nominees couldn’t perform, then neither would she - exactly as Lady Gaga reportedly did this year. Elliott Smith could have been that year’s Gillian Welch.
Titanic remains a formative “Oscar film”, one that introduced an entire generation to and invested them in the Oscars. “My Heart Will Go On” belongs as much to the film’s Oscar narrative as anything else in its dazzlements. For everyone that tuned in to the Oscars to see the film that so captured their hearts get its due, each of them did so eagerly awaiting seeing Céline rip into that key change that kept us listening over and over and over again. This song is a piece of so many people’s first Oscar memories.
Certainly, Oscar songs like “My Heart Will Go On” are once in a lifetime, a high bar that seldom is met for their indelibility. A hit song could never imaginably be excluded from the ceremony, but that isn’t the lesson here. Here “My Heart Will Go On” represents the potential for a nominee to play an integral part of our moviegoing lives, to help make the film that houses it live forever. To not honor that possibility is to eliminate part of the dialogue that we have with a film long after we’ve left the theatre. And how that invests us in the Oscars themselves by honoring that. Don't kill future Oscar memories by killing the performances!
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