Academy Award® Winning Songs

These gilt-edged Essentials represent the cream of movie song collections, because every great tune is accompanied by a small golden man with far-reaching influence . . . named Oscar®. The best of these tracks assume a life and a power far beyond their origins as humble ditties — they can carry the entire emotional impact of a movie, be it Titanic, 8 Mile or The Wizard of Oz. Ryan Bingham opens the selection, with the sublime acoustic melancholy of “The Weary Kind (Theme from Crazy Heart)” and he’s joined by A.R. Rahman and his “Jai Ho” crew, as well as rock legends Bruce Springsteen (“Streets of Philadelphia”) and Elton John (“Can You Feel the Love Tonight”).

In Next Steps, tales of monsters, nannies, and Marxist revolutionaries are captured in Oscar-winning® song.

The language gets exotic in the mid-section of our Oscar® playlist, featuring 2004’s "Al Otro Lado del Rio" from The Motorcycle Diaries, the first winner with an entirely Spanish lyric, as well as Doris Day's bilingual "Whatever Will Be, Will Be (Que Sera, Sera)," while Julie Andrews makes merry with the infectious gibberish of "Chim Chim Cher-ee." Annie Lennox provides the ultimate vocal salute to hobbits, elves and returning kings with “Into the West” from the concluding installment of the Tolkien trilogy, and Billy Crystal partners up with John Goodman for Randy Newman’s feel-good Monsters Inc. tune, “If I Didn’t Have You.”

Bing sings and Keith Carradine croons, country-style, in Deep Cuts.

Our Deep Cuts go old-school with gilt-edged contributions from the artist who appears more often in our playlist than any other: the great Bing Crosby. His duet with Jane Wyman, "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening" — from Frank Capra’s Here Comes the Groom — pays homage to the pleasures of summer dining, 1951-style, while “Sweet Leilani” takes us back to Hawaii and the 1937 movie Waikiki Wedding. Fred Astaire adds debonair flair to 1934's "The Continental," Keith Carradine switches up the mood with “I’m Easy” from Robert Altman’s razor-sharp Nashville (1975) and Tex Ritter goes Western with “High Noon.”

Old and new Hollywood mingle freely within our glistening array of Oscar® songs, so we've got the crisp shoeshine perfectionism of old-time hoofers next to the wildfire street poetry of young-gun Eminem — "Lose Yourself" from 8 Mile — and the ’80s synth-pop of Berlin, coaxing us into the jet-fighter danger zone with Top Gun’s “Take My Breath Away.” All of these tracks not only capture the tone of the movie they represent; they also lodge themselves in corners of our hearts so secure that they can never escape. Every great movie deserves a great song, from Shaft and Fame to Gold Diggers of 1935 and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.