Academy Award® Winning Songs

Some songs don't just decorate movies — they define movies, by wrapping an unforgettable melody around the kernel of emotional intensity that lies at the heart of the drama. The composers of these super-tunes take home a well-deserved gilded statuette for their labours, so let's skip the acceptance speeches and cut straight to the chase, with classics including "My Heart Will Go On" from Titanic, and "Over the Rainbow" from The Wizard of Oz. A couple of forgotten Oscar®-winning tunes lurk among our Next Steps . . .

We're all familiar with the big tunes among these Oscar®-winning pearlers — "White Christmas" from 1942's Holiday Inn, "Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)" from 1956's The Man Who Knew Too Much — but can you name the 1970 movie in which "For All We Know" by the Carpenters wrought its emotive magic? No? It was the comedy Lovers and Other Strangers which features Diane Keaton (in her movie debut) and Sylvester Stallone (as an extra). The very first Oscar®-winning original song, from 1934, can be found in Deep Cuts.

Here, we're keeping it old school, hence several appearances by Bing Crosby — accompanied by Jane Wyman on "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening" from 1951's Here Comes the Groom, and solo on "Sweet Leilani," which features in Waikiki Wedding — and a pleasing cameo from Frank Sinatra, crooning "All the Way" from the Joe E. Lewis bio-pic The Joker Is Wild. Fred Astaire, meanwhile, sails elegantly through 1934's "The Continental" from The Gay Divorcee.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) stipulates that a song must be "original and written specifically for the film" to win an Oscar® — and it's the victorious composers who pick up the little golden fella, which is why some of the tunes on this list are not delivered by their original performers. After all, Beyoncé belted out three nominated songs at the 2004 ceremony, even though she hadn't appeared on all the respective soundtracks. Here, we salute the cream of movie songcraft with a 75-year-span of superlative tunes, from "Al Otro Lado del Río" to "Zip-a-dee-doo- dah."