The category Best Original Song, best original song, at the 2023 Oscars sees Lady Gaga’s encore in the category, after the success of shallowthe surprise of Naatu Naatu after the Golden Globes a few months ago but above all the great return to the scene of Rihanna with an unreleased after about a decade. The five competing songs are very different, each with a story and personality of her own. It will be interesting to see how they are performed on stage at the 95th Academy Awards, in the meantime we advise you to listen to at least three, regardless of how the night of March 12 goes.
This is a Life – Son Lux, Mitski, David Byrne
In the world I wish he would win This is a Life. A splendid piece, in form and content, that is to say in music and text. The post-rock atmospheres battered with electronic nuances of Son Lux and the unsustainable strength of Mitski’s fragile voice find a perfect composition thanks to the genius of David Byrne. A song that it slips with refined delicacy into the sonorous lines of lifebrings out from the mind, only through hearing, one composition of moving images that doesn’t matter if they come from your experience or from a collective memory: Import their human character that reunites you with your species, without even the need for a film to guide them.
But the world I would like, I know, is not this.
Choice from Alessio Tommasoli
Naatu Naatu by Maragadha Mani Keeravani And Lift me up by Rihanna
It is a dance, as the title could roughly translate from the Telugu language in which the film is performed RRR. Naatu Naatu is a viral phenomenon, for its splendid choreography, but above all it is a declaration, an affirmation of identity and self-determination. It is the moment in which it is included in the film (available on Netflix) that makes it so: a response to the attempt colonial British to silence the Indian presence and life force. The music of Maragadha Mani Keeravani, an Indian composer who aims to double with the Academy after the Golden Globes is also splendid.
It is enough to listen only to the first note, in the last scene of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, to feel a thrill. It will be because the moment is perfect for that spiritual and emotional reconciliation with life (and with death) that the ending suggests. Or maybe because it’s Rihanna’s voice that has been missing for so long to thrill regardless. The elevation suggested by the title, lift me up, it is tangible. In the running time of the music over the end credits, one is abstracted from the world, each next to the memory and feeling of what “keeps us safe in the warmth of the one we love”. It is a farewell letter, a declaration of love so delicate and poignant that it even survives the intrinsic meaning of the film, albeit perfect for that ending.
Chosen by Valeria Verbaro
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