Character Counts: Songs in the Oscar Race Go Beyond Just Being Pretty Tunes

Key Highlights

• Related Stories 'Heated Rivalry' Creators Jacob Tierney and Brendan Brady to Be Honored at NYC LGBT Community Center Gala From ‘Drugstore Cowboy’ and ‘Good Will Hunting’ to ‘Dead Man’s Wire,’ Gus Van Sant Reflects on Over 40 Years of Feature Filmmaking “The Girl in the Bubble,” sung by Ariana Grande, “is Glinda’s turning point,” he says, “where she realizes that she just cannot go on insulating herself from life and the consequences of what the people around her are doing, and what she’s acceding to.
• It seemed really important to take the time to have Glinda look at her own reflection and decide she can’t live any longer with what she’s seeing and has to make a change.” Popular on Variety The other song, Cynthia Erivo’s “No Place Like Home,” helps to set up the finale as Elphaba “makes an enormous sacrifice in order to try and save Oz,” Schwartz adds.
• “We felt that we really wanted to understand what that cost her, how much she loved her homeland and being a part of it, even if it didn’t show the same love back to her.” Expressing complicated emotions in music can be a challenge, Schwartz says, conceding that Elphaba’s song “went through a lot of iterations.
• (But) songs are at their best when they are multi-layered.” For the six-minute finale of “Highest 2 Lowest,” director Spike Lee sought a fresh, unknown singer-songwriter to “audition” for record-label executive Denzel Washington.
• Lee found Aiyana-Lee, a British-born L. A.