Worst to Best: Music Videos for Best Original Song Oscar Winners

Sure, all these songs won Oscars for the movies in which they appear. But how do they work as music videos?

In theory at least, nominees in the Academy Awards’ Best Original Song category are judged not by the film to which they’re attached or the fame of the artists who perform them or the songwriters who create them, but by the songs themselves. They’re certainly not judged by the music videos used to promote them. But since music videos attained widespread popularity in the early 1980s, nearly every Oscar-winning song has also had an accompanying video, a little movie spotlighting a song tied to a big movie.

Most are, to put it frankly, pretty dull, offering only slight variations on a formula already in place in the 1981 clip for Christopher Cross’s “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)”: Show the artist performing the song in a setting at least a little evocative of the film. Intersperse some film clips. Et, voilà! Some, however, get memorably creative and, taken as a whole, they offer a short history of changing tastes in music videos and how to integrate elements from the films they help soundtrack.

It’s a phenomenon worth exploring, even if some examples don’t put in too much effort. In the list that follows, we’re ignoring videos that either excerpt a musical scene wholesale, only use clips from their movies with no new material, or have no music video. (For the record, that eliminates songs from An Officer and a Gentleman, Flashdance, The Little Mermaid, Dick Tracy, Beauty and the Beast, Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Monsters Inc., Hustle & Flow, Once, The Muppets, Skyfall, Frozen, La La Land and RRR.)

With that out of the way, let’s plunge into the videos that made an effort, if sometimes a minimal effort, to create their own works of cinematic art.

28. “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)” from Arthur (1981)
Performed by Christopher Cross

On the one hand, this clip deserves some credit for showing a lot of movie soundtrack videos, Oscar-nominated and otherwise, how it’s done. On the other hand, it looks like it was filmed and assembled in an afternoon. Credit where it’s due: the video did likely get John Gielgud on MTV once or twice.

25. (tie)  “A Whole New World,” from Aladdin (1992)
Performed by Peabo Bryson and Regina Belle

25. (tie) “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” from The Lion King (1994)
Performed by Elton John

25. (tie) “Colors of the Wind,” from Pocahontas (1995)
Performed by Vanessa Williams

After eschewing videos for renaissance-era hits The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, Disney decided to make one for Aladdin—and then essentially remake the same video for The Lion King and Pocahontas. All feature their performers hanging out on a set suggestive of the films between clips from the films themselves. “Can You Feel the Love Tonight” veers slightly away from the formula by allowing John to join in on the animated action via the magic of cheesy ’90s editing techniques.

24. “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” from The Woman in Red (1984)
performed by Stevie Wonder

Cultural memory can be short. It’s impossible to find an official version of the “I Just Called to Say I Love You” video on YouTube and the live clip linked from the song’s Wikipedia page is from a concert in which Wonder performs the song on stage while singing into a telephone. (Because he just called to say he loves you. From the bottom of his heart.) But the video linked to above, which uses some of the same concert footage, looks legit down to the ’80s-style computer imagery. The straight performance clip is better, but in either form, this is not Wonder’s finest hour.

23. “(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life,” from Dirty Dancing (1987)
Performed by Bill Medley and Jennifer Warnes

A glossy variation of the “Arthur’s Theme” approach to music videos, this clip features Warnes and Medley singing against a window flooding a room with sunlight in dramatic black and white footage that alternates with scenes from the film. It’s a thoroughly respectable execution of a time-tested but dull approach. Call it the Mendoza Line of the minigenre.