Evolution of the Award-Bait Song
The Award-Bait Song is an Older Than They Think concept, but one that took many years to reach its peak of use in The '90s. Its development parallels that of Oscar Bait in some ways.
The Academy Award for Best Original Song — a full list of winners and nominees is here
at the Other Wiki — was first given out in 1934. In the years that followed the arrival of sound to motion pictures, The Musical was a genre that especially thrived and songwriters, some of whom became associated with the Great American Songbook (George Gershwin, Irving Berlin, Cole Porter) were imported from Broadway to Hollywood to turn out tunes for them, many of which became pop hits. However, few if any of these songs would fit the trope.
When Walt Disney turned his fledgling studio's talents to a full-length animated feature, the result — while not actually nominated for an Oscar — was one of the first examples of an Award-Bait Song in its sweet sentiments: "Someday My Prince Will Come". In the wake of its roaring success, it became a cliche that a Disney animated feature would have at least one sweet, idealistic ballad often triumphantly reprised by a chorale come the Happily Ever After. The first obvious example of an Award Bait Song in a live-action film would come two years after Snow White: "Over the Rainbow" in The Wizard of Oz, a film that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer had intended as their answer to Disney's monster hit. While the film would have to be Vindicated by History to become the icon it is now, "Over the Rainbow" did win an Oscar and is generally regarded as the single most famous movie song of all time. Its runner-up — Pinocchio's "When You Wish Upon a Star" — arrived from Disney the following year, 1940, and was the first Disney production to win the Song Oscar; the song eventually became the Bootstrapped Theme of The Walt Disney Company as a whole.
However, in an era when movie musicals were thick on the ground, there was such a plethora of tunes to choose from that come awards season there was no guaranteed formula for a winning song. For instance, Disney wouldn't win in this category again until 1947 with the Song of the South theme song "Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah", and save for a triumphal choral reprise at the end it's not Award Bait fare. Neither is their next winning tune, Mary Poppins's "Chim-Chim-Cher-ee". About the only throughline for most Best Song winners through The '60s was that, whether they were from a musical or not, they were often sentimental, romantic, and likely to become a radio hit with the over-40 crowd that was still listening to Frank Sinatra and his peers, duking it out for chart supremacy against those dreaded new genres of rock 'n' roll and R&B — which, at the time, were largely ghettoized in B-pictures for the drive-in crowd if they appeared on film.
The arrival of New Hollywood initially did not affect the movie theme song that much, because many New Hollywood filmmakers weren't especially interested in using them and the popularity of film musicals was waning after several expensive bombs in the late 1960s. A mainstream movie that had a theme song was likely to be either shooting for kids and their grandparents or a romance, so though there were occasional Best Song nominees and winners that bucked the trend of sentimental sentiments and sounds — "Theme from Shaft" was the 1971 winner — most still erred on the side of treacle. Lyrically, at least, they continue to do so to this day.
The good news was that emotional pop ballads were welcomed on AM radio in particular in The '70s, and "easy listening" singers like Barry Manilow and Debbie Boone were easy to marry to the sentimental tone of the contemporary movie theme song. Come 1977, Boone's cover version of "You Light Up My Life" became a gigantic Breakaway Pop Hit and helped it become a Best Song Oscar Winner when few even knew it was derived from a movie — and helped refine the Award Bait Song template.
That same year studios and record labels began to realize that there was a bigger market for movie soundtracks than previously believed — especially if the tunes reflected the times. Saturday Night Fever saw no Oscar nominations for its music, but its double-length soundtrack album headlined by The Bee Gees was explosively successful, furthered the film's popularity, and became a cornerstone of disco as a genre. Grease would see similar success the following year.
At the top of The '80s Top 40 artists were actively wooed to provide theme songs and/or entire soundtracks for movies, and it began to show on the Billboard charts. In 1981 three movie theme songs topped the Hot 100 for multiple weeks — "9 to 5", "Endless Love", and "Arthur's Theme (Best That You Can Do)". "Arthur's Theme" ended up the 1981 Best Song Oscar winner and began a remarkable run of movie songs that both hit the top of the Hot 100 chart and won an Oscar, followed by "Up Where We Belong", "Flashdance (What a Feeling)", "I Just Called to Say I Love You" (from The Woman in Red), "Say You, Say Me" (from White Nights), "Take My Breath Away", and finally "(I've Had) The Time of My Life" in 1987. And beyond the winners were tons of other theme tunes that hit Number One, many of these also seeing Oscar nominations.
That said, not all of the songs being written for inclusion in films were award bait. Generally, a movie that involved a romance in some way — even if it was just a subplot — was most likely to invoke this trope. Other genres worked from other styles of music, with theme tunes for films like Ghostbusters verging into novelty song territory with their unconventional subject matter; even Howard the Duck had a Title Theme Tune. Nor were songs confined to the opening and/or end credits; anywhere in a film's setting where it would be natural to have pop music playing in the background of a scene — a high school prom, a nightclub, a dive bar, a car, etc. — was game for having an original song slipped into the background (or performed onscreen if appropriate) and from there onto the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack. An original song was practically a given for any '80s Montage worth its celluloid.
The rise of MTV further accelerated movie theme songs being used as marketing campaign cornerstones, as the Video Full of Film Clips and the Movie Tie-In Music Video became common. It wound up giving a big boost to a certain mouse...not Mickey, though. Not yet.
"Somewhere Out There", from Don Bluth's An American Tail, was one of the first animated musicals to have a pop duet version of its big ballad performed over its end credits, in this case by Linda Ronstadt and James Ingram. A Video Full of Film Clips was also produced. Because its lyrics weren't specific enough to give away that it was sung by/about separated brother and sister mice, it worked as a polished adult contemporary pop number that was easy to reinterpret as a Silly Love Song, and helped expand the potential audience for the animated feature to adults in an age where the Animation Age Ghetto was strictly enforced. While the song "only" made it to Number Two on the charts and lost the Oscar to "Take My Breath Away", that was still a massive success, one that Disney would pick up on a few years later...
When, having thoroughly revived its animation department, it hired Peabo Bryson and Celine Dion to perform an end-credit duet version of Beauty and the Beast's theme song. With the movie a phenomenal success financially and with awards organizations, the song — a throwback to the classic Disney theme style — won the Best Original Song Oscar and was a Top 10 hit. One of the songs it beat happened to be a Silly Love Song, Bryan Adams's "(Everything I Do) I Do It for You", which had been one of the radio hits of 1991...despite it not having much to do with its source movie, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
In 1992 Disney scored more linked hits with Aladdin and "A Whole New World", but it was a Cover Version of an oldie that wound up cementing the golden age of the Award Bait Song — Whitney Houston's cover of Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You", from Houston's Non-Actor Vehicle The Bodyguard. The song's monster success was reflected in that of the soundtrack album, one of the biggest sellers of the decade. For the remainder of the decade, studios were hungry to capture or recapture these successes, and soon TV ads for blockbuster wannabes commonly ended with listings of the Top 40 artists appearing on their soundtracks, even if only for a few moments of actual screen time in the movie — if any.
The desire to top-load soundtracks with musical megastars led to a glut of "Music from and inspired by" albums, the terminology reflecting the fact that many of these songs did not actually appear in the films in question. It also became common to repackage previously-released songs on such soundtracks, as happened with Seal's "Kiss from a Rose", which was repurposed for Batman Forever, in hopes of widening the potential audiences for both film and album. And more and more, the Award-Bait Song became THE center of such soundtracks.
The trope went into decline at the turn of the millennium. Reasons included Disney and other studios' animated musicals using the trope so often that it became easily mocked as a cliche. Indeed, audiences became so tired of animated musicals that for a time even Disney stopped making them, though they would return to the form in The New '10s more sparingly and successfully. There had also been backlashes to the omnipresence of first "I Will Always Love You" and later "My Heart Will Go On" (the theme from the biggest film of the 1990s, Titanic). Also, as tender love songs began turning up in noticeably unromantic films such as Armageddon (1998) and Con Air, it became clear how generic the lyrics and sentiments of such songs actually were. Finally, it's likely that the music industry's near-collapse in the wake of file-sharing services and the like, which hurt physical single and album sales, drove a stake through the heart of the concept of all-star, all-genre soundtrack albums as a go-to marketing tool.
Award Bait Songs are still out there of course, but they're much more likely to be in actual musicals, thanks in part to the revival of The Musical in live-action film spearheaded by such works as Chicago and Moulin Rouge!. There are also certain types of non-musicals that still have theme songs as a matter of course, most famously the James Bond movies. In general, the more vital the Award Bait Song is to its movie, the better its chances of winning. And while it's much rarer for a movie theme song and/or soundtrack to top the Billboard charts, when they do, it's a good sign that the movie and its music is truly connecting with people — see Frozen.
