At this year’s Academy Awards, coming up on Sunday March 15, one song that had reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100, HUNTR/X’s megahit “Golden” from KPop Demon Hunters, is competing for best original song. That’s nothing compared to the 1985 Oscars, when all five nominees had been No. 1 hits, for the first and (so far) only time in Oscar history.
The nominees included two songs from Footloose – Kenny Loggins’ rhythmic title song and Deniece Williams’ midtempo R&B/pop charmer, “Let’s Hear It for the Boy.” Footloose was just the fourth film to spawn two best original song nominees, following Fame in 1981 and a pair of films in 1984, Flashdance and Yentl. Dean Pitchford, who wrote the screenplay for Footloose and co-wrote all the songs on the soundtrack, was nominated for co-writing both songs. He was the only nominee in the category that year who had previously won an Oscar. In 1981, he won for co-writing Irene Cara’s smash “Fame” from the film of the same name.
The other nominees were Phil Collins’ torch ballad “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)” from Against All Odds; Ray Parker Jr.’s catchy earworm “Ghostbusters” from the film of the same name; and Stevie Wonder’s warm, sentimental “I Just Called to Say I Love You” from The Woman in Red.
Two of these songs, “Against All Odds (Take a Look at Me Now)” and “I Just Called To Say I Love You,” also received Grammy nods for song of the year. (The Grammys didn’t introduce their category of best song written for visual media until 1988.)
As stacked as this category was that year, two other film songs topped the Hot 100 that year and were not nominated – Prince’s “When Doves Cry” and Prince and the Revolution’s “Let’s Go Crazy,” both from Purple Rain. But Prince did win an Oscar that night for best original song score.
Travel back with us to the 57th annual Academy Awards, held at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles on March 25, 1985, the only ceremony where all five nominees for best original song were No. 1 Hot 100 hits.
