This year’s Academy Awards looks set to be a good one. We’ve got one of the strongest Best Picture lineups in years, and many of the biggest categories are competitive, with only a few seeming locks in the lead-up to March 15. It’s rare that the Oscars feel as unpredictable as they do this season, but there is one constant, omnipresent nominee whose annual return to the Kodak Theater has proved baffling and weary in equal measure. In life, we are apparently guaranteed three things: Death, taxes, and Diane Warren being nominated for Best Original Song.
This year saw Warren receive her 17th nomination in this category. She has been present in Best Original Song for nine years in a row now, forever losing to bigger stars or more mainstream hits. 2026 sees her nominated for “Dear Me,” a forgettable song she wrote for Diane Warren: Relentless, a documentary of her own life. It’s the kind of joke that writes itself. She got in over Miley Cyrus, Japanese Breakfast, and Nine Inch Nails, as well as the music from The Testament of Ann Lee, which wasn’t even longlisted.
Famously, Warren has never won in this category, and receiving an honorary Oscar in 2022 did nothing to fuel her ruthless drive to win a competitive statuette. There’s a great story here of fighting the odds and pursuing your ambitions, but Warren’s recent run of nominated songs is so poor that it makes rooting for her rather difficult.
Once upon a time, Warren was a powerhouse of pop music. She’s responsible for some of the most beloved and catchiest pop hits of the ’80s and ’90s. Warren has written nine number-one songs and 33 top-10 songs on the Billboard Hot 100, and the chances are high that you’ve sung at least one of them at karaoke: “Rhythm of the Night”; “If I Could Turn Back Time”; “Because You Loved Me”; “Can’t Fight the Moonlight”; “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now”; and “Un-Break My Heart,” to name but a few. If you needed high-drama love songs with no frills and an easy emotional hook, Warren was your go-to songwriter.
Movie songs have long been a part of her success, whether it’s Mannequin, Con Air, or Armageddon. Back when it was common practice for a major movie to have an accompanying soundtrack and a few guaranteed chart-toppers to its name, Warren perfected the formula. But at the dawn of a new millennium, things began to change. Warren only landed one Oscar nomination during the 2000s, for “There You’ll Be,” the “we have ‘The Heart Will Go On’ at home”-accompanying track to Pearl Harbor. Her brand of pop and easy listening wasn’t in fashion during the decade, and films stopped prioritizing the kinds of soundtracks Warren specialized in.
In the 2010s, Warren kicked into gear her hunt for the Oscar. It started out strongly enough, with “Grateful,” a solid ballad from Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Beyond the Lights. She followed that up with one of her best songs of this era, “Til it Happens To You,” from the campus rape documentary The Hunting Ground. That one, loaded with fury and pain, was co-written and sung by Lady Gaga. Her heart-wrenching performance of it at the Oscars, where Gaga was joined on-stage by fellow survivors of sexual assault, seemed like a crowning moment in both their careers. But then Sam Smith’s dreary Bond theme won. Audiences fairly thought Warren and Gaga had been robbed.
Warren doubled down her chase for the win after that, yet the results only got worse. She started popping up in the Best Original Song category every year, always with songs that were never chart hits or critical darlings, and always from films you’d either forgotten existed or believed had been made up on the spot. It seemed random that she’d write a song for the Ruth Bader Ginsburg documentary RBG, but it made way more sense than seeing her name credited on things like the Christian drama Breakthrough or Tyler Perry’s The Six Triple Eight. What is Tell It Like a Woman? Or The Life Ahead? And how was Warren getting nominated for them?
All of these songs are, in a word, bad. Rooting for Warren in her unabashed hunger for a competitive Oscar would be a hell of a lot easier if the tracks were good, but the past decade of her nominations have been either utterly forgettable or abjectly terrible. It’s an endless assembly line of bland lyrics, anodyne melodies (whenever they’re present, which they often aren’t), and easy listening dirges. And to rub salt into the wound, none of them have anything to do with their respective films. They’re end-credit white noise designed to be ignored as you leave the theater or hit the stop button. Once upon a time, Diane Warren made legendary earworms, joyous dance hits, and high-stakes ballads with intense and earnest melodrama. None of that is present in her perennial Best Original Song candidates.
Take “The Fire Inside,” written for the biopic about the guy who didn’t create Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. Sung decently by Becky G, the song is dull to the point of insulting, repeating the phrase “the fire” no fewer than 29 times. “Nothing can hold you back / No one can kill your vibe / When you got the fire inside.” It’s stock pseudo-inspirational filler music, akin to the “Loving Lovers Love” parody song in Mystery Science Theater 3000. And honestly, you could copy-and-paste these critiques into reviews of any nominated song by Warren of the past decade.
Warren’s endless presence at the Oscars has raised more than a few eyebrows, but Best Original Song is sort of an embarrassing category. A lot of big-name singers have an easy time getting nominated for random projects with songs clearly designed solely to get recognized by the Academy. The music branch, which decides the shortlist, is one of the smallest in the Academy, earning it claims of cronyism. The one time an Oscar nomination was rescinded was in this very category, when the winning composer, Bruce Broughton, had improperly reached out to other members to lobby for his song. Warren’s endless appearance in the category for bad work in unseen flicks certainly doesn’t help matters. She’s an industry favorite who’s been around for decades. Everyone in the Music Branch knows her. They know she wants the win badly. She’s in with the group, and we know the Academy hates change. So why not just keep encouraging her with nod after nod?
You cannot help but wish that Warren had won decades ago with a song that deserved it, like “I Don’t Want To Miss a Thing” from Armageddon, which is both a great power ballad and an indelible part of the movie it’s from. At this point in her search for gold, it feels like she’s not even trying, writing songs in the hopes that her competition will be so weak that she won’t even need to put effort in. Perhaps she’ll fare better if she gets to collaborate on a big movie, one seen by more than a handful of people at an Academy screening or made by a director who gives her some creative parameters to work within. She has already made her public plea to Paul Thomas Anderson and Christopher Nolan for a future collaboration (The Odyssey power ballad, anyone?) For now, it’d be best if she prepared her losing smile for when K-Pop Demon Hunters or Sinners wins this year.
