OSCARS AND MUSIC: BALLOTS HEADING OUT

Academy Award music-branch voters can start submitting their choices tomorrow (1/11). With a Golden Globe already secured, it looks like Billie Eilish is the front-runner in the song category. The nominees will be announced 1/23.

Eilish and FINNEAS already have an Oscar and a Globe for their James Bond theme “No Time to Die” in 2021.

An Oscar win for their contribution to Barbie, “What Was I Made For?” (Darkroom/Interscope), would put them in rare company: Elton John is the only other performer to sweep the Globes and Oscars twice. He did it most recently with Rocketman’s “(I’m Gonna) Love Me Again),” written with Bernie Taupin and Taron Egerton, in 2019, and previously in 1994 with The Lion King’s “Can You Feel the Love Tonight,” written with Tim Rice.

Voters will be whittling down from the shortlist of 15 that includes three songs from Barbie—Dua Lipa’s “Dance The Night” and “I’m Just Ken” are the others—and two from The Color Purple, “Keep It Movin’” and “Superpower (I).”

Star power among the contenders can be found in Olivia Rodrigo’s “Can’t Catch Me Now” (Geffen) from The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds & Snakes and the Becky G-sung “The Fire Inside” (Kemosabe/RCA) from Disney’s Flamin’ Hot.

Jon Baptiste, who already has an Oscar to go with his five Grammys, is the lone composer contending for a song, “It Never Went Away” (Verve/Interscope), and a score nomination, both for his work in American Symphony, a documentary on his personal and professional life.

His is among the final 15 scores that includes John Williams’ Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Globe winner Ludwig Göransson (Oppenheimer), Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt’s Barbie, and Thomas Newman’s Elemental. Williams hasn’t won since 1994; Göransson won in 2018 for Black Panther; and Newman has been nominated 15 times and never won.