The Hills Were Alive With the Sound of 'Glory': Ranking the 2015 Oscars' Musical Moments

photo: John Shearer/Invision/AP

Was there ever any doubt that John Legend’s and Common’s performance of “Glory” would be the musical highlight of the Oscars? Well, yes, as a matter of fact, there was, if only because their performance of the song on the Grammys telecast just two weeks ago might have made a rerun seem anticlimactic. Happily, that wasn’t the case, thanks to some inventive staging that gave the Selma theme new and extra-emotive TV life.

The show also had one thoroughly unexpected highlight going for it: Lady Gaga’s surprise turn as a tatted-up ex-novitiate. Here, from most to least impressive, were the 2015 Oscars’ musical moments:

1. COMMON & JOHN LEGEND: “Glory”

All of the other Best Song nominees were severely condensed down to timeslots lasting only a minute and a half or so each. But you knew that wouldn’t happen with Selma’s shoo-in song, which had to accept all the glory on behalf of its otherwise-unrewarded film. A bare-bones version of the song would have sufficed, but the production designers hit a homerun by having Common and the choir enter via a digital rendering of the Edmund Pettis Bridge, where some of the real glory went down. In a category that so often seems irrelevant, both musically and cinematically, seeing something so of-the-moment get its due could make you cry, even if you aren’t David Oyelowo.

2. LADY GAGA: Sound of Music medley

How do you solve a problem like everybody already knowing what to expect out of the musical numbers on the Oscars? We already knew Gaga could sing, as she had been ever-increasingly eager to impress on us. We just didn’t know she could sing… certain notes. Having Gaga channel Julie Andrews was a stunt, to be sure, but a smart stunt that paid off not just as a watercooler moment but as a musical one. Even if you find Gaga’s mannerisms in her ongoing Tony Bennett collaboration bordering on camp, you’d be hard-pressed to find much reason to carp about her respectful, entirely capable reading of a handful of Rodgers & Hammerstein classics. So could we get a do-over of that live NBC Sound of Music from a year and half back? Because some of us still want to hear Gaga do “The Lonely Goatherd.”

3. TIM McGRAW: “I’m Not Gonna Miss You”

The suspense here had to do with the staging, and whether the Oscars would augment McGraw’s performance with some kind of visuals to pay homage to Glen Campbell and/or draw attention to the subject of Alzheimer’s. In the end, they just left the performance alone. That wasn’t to everyone’s liking, as some viewers took to social media to express how much powerful they thought it would have been if there’d been a corresponding video backdrop. But we think they made the right call by making it plain and simple. The message? After that introduction, not many viewers were gonna miss it.

4. TEGAN & SARA AND THE LONELY ISLAND: “Everything Is Awesome”

There would simply be no way to make this song as awesome onstage as it was on the soundtrack of The LEGO Movie, but, hey, credit for trying. The pop/rap version that appeared over the end credits was recreated with cameos squeezed in for producer Mark Mothersbaugh and drummer Questlove, and it brought some much-needed life to the telecast, even if any sense of the original tune’s wicked satire was lost among the confetti. Its best reason-for-being was so that later on we could delight to the sight of Emma Stone clutching the LEGO Oscar she’d been handed as she headed into a sure loss in the Best Supporting Actress category.

5. NEIL PATRICK HARRIS, ANNA KENDRICK, AND JACK BLACK: “Moving Pictures”

The opening production number had a tough, self-contradictory job to pull off: being irreverent enough to make us laugh in lieu of an opening monologue, but just reverent enough to let us know we were watching the Oscars and not the Golden Globes. Err on the side of wickedness, and you’ve got a Seth MacFarlane year on your hands, right? Frozen songwriters Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez did an admirable job of trying to marry those warring demands. To their credit, they managed to rhyme “Lando” with “when Sharon went commando,” along with coming up with some sentimental but not altogether treacly lines about how the movies “may not be real life, but they’ll show you what life really means.” But Jack Black’s interruption was never as cynically funny as we expected, and Kendrick seemed a little unsure what her part was meant to add, too. Call it a draw.

6. MAROON 5: “Lost Stars”

This was the nominated songs that suffered most from being so ridiculously truncated. The acoustic opening led you to think Adam Levine would be doing a slow build on the song he delivered in Begin Again, and then all of a sudden he was already onto the climactic falsetto, and that was all she wrote. We still got the gist of the Gregg Alexander/Danielle Brisebois power ballad, but it could still have used a lengthier or more memorable treatment… even if we were never going to get the best-case scenario, which would have involved scaredy-cat co-star Keira Knightley coming up for a duet.

7. RITA ORA: “Grateful”

The suspense here was whether Ora and songwriter Diane Warren might have live fisticuffs, given how ungrateful Warren has accused Ora of being, since the songstress allegedly didn’t do anything to promote the song between recording it for Beyond the Lights and getting this plum Oscar slot. Ora did a fine job of convincing us home viewers that she really does believe in the song, but despite her sure-footedness, it felt like a minute and a half where the Oscars were marking time more than making musical history.

8. JENNIFER HUDSON: “I Can’t Let Go”

Hudson sang the hell out of this song she introduced on the television series Smash, but… it was a song from the television series Smash, which means it was no “The Way We Were.” As you may remember, two years ago Barbra Streisand brought the house down by following the In Memoriam segment with one of her most beloved songs (partly because writer Marvin Hamlisch had died that year); then, it seemed appropriate that the ballad would not serve merely as a soundtrack to the montage of late-greats. Doing the same thing this time, though, just left viewers scratching their heads over why someone whose performance hadn’t been introduced was singing a long and mournful tune they’d never heard before, at far greater length than any of the nominated songs. Hudson was as emotional as you’d hope — this is a woman who knows, and can do, grief — but it still felt like an odd and overextended choice.

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