Diane Warren is taking her latest Oscar loss in stride, posting on social media after the ceremony: “Well at least I’m consistent! And I set a new record tonite!! But U know me, I will be back if you’ll have me!!!”
Surely they will — Warren has not not picked up a nomination for best original song since 2016, a streak that practically marks her as a shoo-in for another nod in 2027, regardless of the world’s foreknowledge of what songs she has coming this year. In the meantime, she has now gotten a nod in that category 17 total times without a win, which finally puts her on top with the all-time record for the most nominated person to not yet have a competitive Oscar.
Of course, Warren is far from altogether Oscar-less, having picked up an honorary Academy Award at the Governors Award in 2022, although that has not dampened her enthusiasm to win a competitive trophy… or lessened the Academy’s eagerness to put her in a near-miss position year after year.
At least she couldn’t call it unexpected this year, as the chart-topping pop smash “Golden” from “KPop Demon Hunters” was pegged by every prognosticator to walk away with the prize.
At least if Warren had won this year, they would not have had to awkwardly use music to play off a second person waiting at the mic to give a speech, since Warren famously almost never uses a co-writer, making her a unicorn among modern tunesmiths.
Warren was up for “Dear Me,” a ballad she wrote for “Diane Warren: Relentless,” a documentary about her own life, sung by Kesha.
Asked recently by the New York Times if winning the honorary Oscar made up for not getting a standard Academy Award, Warren said, “You know, I still haven’t won the competitive one. And I’m a competitive person. It’s amazing to have the honorary Oscar — that’s harder to get than the competitive. I don’t take that for granted. But, yeah, I still want to win. My honorary Oscar gets really lonely. He wants a friend. He hangs out with Rabbit, my cat, but he prefers to have an Oscar buddy.”
She noted that, coming into the ceremony, she was tied with a pal for the most nominations and losses without a win.
“It’s not validation,” she told the Times. “It would just be fun. And now I just keep beating my own record, I guess. Right now, I’m tied with my friend Greg Russell; we both have lost 16 times. But I’ve never taken awards as validation. The work is validation. When people love the songs, that’s validation. Who doesn’t want to win, right? But you can’t live and die by that because it’s out of your control. What’s in my control is to do the best work I can.”
The friend who was previously tied with her, Greg P. Russell, is a 16-times-nominated sound mixer who now has to settle for second place in this unique competition.
Warren recognized that, entering the final stretch, “I know I’m the underdog, for sure — or undercat. Can I be an undercat? I’m a cat person. They’re fast and they’ve got claws.”
Warren long since set a record for the woman with the most nominations in the best original song category. If she does get nominated again next year, she will be tied for the second-most for any songwriter, with Johnny Mercer, who scored 18 in his lifetime. She still has a few to go to beat Sammy Cahn, who scored 26, as the most-nominated ever.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source variety.com ’
