We know what to expect from most performances of Best Song nominees at the annual Academy Awards ceremony. Singers with huge voices will be belting out bombastic ballads. Orchestral accompaniment will swell around them.
That’s mostly what transpired in 1998 at the 70th annual event. At least until an unheralded indie singer-songwriter briefly took the show in a much different direction.
The Filmmaker and the Singer
When film director Gus Van Sant was making his 1995 movie To Die For, he was sent a batch of music for possible use in a specific scene. That batch included albums by a little-known singer-songwriter named Elliott Smith, both his solo stuff and work with his band Heatmiser.
Van Sant didn’t use any of Smith’s music then. But he immediately became a huge fan. A few years later, Smith was putting together his next film, Good Will Hunting. He was looking for a recurring theme in the music. And he e thought having Smith’s anguished folk playing throughout the movie might be just what it needed.
Van Sant looked up Smith in Portland, Oregon, and befriended him. At that time, Smith’s career was about to hit another level. A major label was courting him for the first time. Encouraged by Van Sant’s own experience as a musician, Smith agreed to allow his music in the film.
“Misery” Loves Company
Since Good Will Hunting was a Miramax film, an Oscar campaign was a foregone conclusion. Since the previously-released Smith songs wouldn’t be eligible for Best Song nominations, he was encouraged to write a new one. But he fudged on that request just a little bit.
Smith had actually written and done a previous recording of “Miss Misery” prior to unearthing it as the “original” composition for Good Will Hunting. Nonetheless, the gambit worked. Elliott Smith, barely known outside his local haunts and some devout indie music fans, was headed to the Oscars.
On the night of the show, Smith was shoehorned between Trisha Yearwood and Celine Dion in a medley-type presentation of the nominees. He came out with his acoustic guitar and delivered a shortened but still mesmerizing performance of “Miss Misery”, raising his exposure level an infinite amount in just less than two minutes.
Celine’s Sweet Gesture
In Nobody Breaks Your Heart, Jamie Fisher’s biography of Smith, the author related how Smith and Dion developed a surprising bond in the moments before and after the performance:
“’She was really, really sweet,’ Elliott said years later. ‘It made it impossible for me to not like Celine Dion anymore.’ She hugged him, and he sounded moved still when he talked about it. ‘It was simply too human to be dismissed,’ he said.”
Although “Miss Misery” lost that night to Dion’s Titanic song “My Heart Will Go On”, the performance acted as a fulcrum for the trajectory of his career. The double-whammy of that night and XO, Smith’s stunning major-label debut released later that year, turned him into a revered artist.
That kind of adulation might not have been the best thing ultimately for Smith’s fragile psyche. Nonetheless, his heartrending rendition of “Miss Misery” that night provided an Oscar musical moment not soon forgotten.
Photo by Andy Willsher/Redferns/Getty Images
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Author: Jim Beviglia