At last year's Academy Awards, the race for best original song was sleepy enough that the nominees — led by winner "El Mal," from Emilia Pérez — weren't even performed on the telecast. This year, the category shows more signs of life, as only two of the five nominees will receive a full live treatment on TV this Sunday.
That move is a bummer for the category's also-rans: a dreamy closing-credits dirge, an operatic piece from a little-seen documentary and an obligatory reminder that Diane Warren will most likely receive a doomed Oscar nomination every year until the end of time. But for the clear front-runners — both of which are 1) fantastic and 2) nicely suited to energetic live staging — the prime-time showcase was a no-brainer.
This is the eighth year NPR has published a ranking of the best original song nominees — here's 2025, 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020 and 2019 — and it's virtually impossible to view this year's field as anything but a two-horse race, though you're unlikely to regret checking out at least one or two of the other nominees. Let's get to it!
5. "Dear Me," Diane Warren: Relentless, performed by Kesha (Diane Warren, songwriter)
If you could write a note to your younger self, what would it say? "Do a better job taking other people into consideration"? "Tell your loved ones how you feel while they're still around"? "Always wear earplugs at concerts"? Or, barring that, how about: "Do everything possible to convince voters at the 1999 Oscars to pick 'I Don't Want to Miss a Thing' over 'When You Believe,' so that Diane Warren can release her eternal chokehold on the category of best original song before it gets out of hand"?
Any of those pieces of hindsight advice would be more insightful than the ones Warren writes to her younger self in "Dear Me." (Chief among them: "It's gonna be all right.") That song, performed by Kesha, anchors the documentary Diane Warren: Relentless, which seems to exist for the sole purpose of featuring a song that would net Warren a 17th unrequited Oscar nomination. (That's right: Diane Warren has, prior to this year, been nominated for 16 Academy Awards and won zero.) The film depicts the songwriter as, among other things, fixated on winning an Academy Award — the honorary one she took home in November 2022 doesn't count — which should come as no surprise to anyone who's watched her chase down nominations for nine consecutive years and counting.
The problem is that, while Warren has always possessed a gift for melody, she rarely infuses her songs with sentiments more nuanced than what you might find stitched on the nearest throw pillow. Her recent run leans mostly on themes of resilience, defiance and/or affirmation, and "Dear Me" is no different. In its final form, it's elevated by a committed performance from Kesha, who's operating in "Praying" mode here. And, of Warren's nine most recent nominated songs — the ones since "Till It Happens to You," her 2015 Lady Gaga collaboration, which should have won in this category a decade ago — "Dear Me" may well stand as the most memorable. But it's almost certainly, and rightly, doomed to the same fate as its predecessors.
4. "Train Dreams," Train Dreams, performed by Nick Cave and Bryce Dessner (Nick Cave & Bryce Dessner, songwriters)
To be eligible for best original song, a track simply needs to be written for — and appear somewhere within — an Oscars-eligible film. In many cases, nominated songs simply roll over the closing credits, which can be aggravating when the work in question barely nods to the film's themes.
"Train Dreams," which rock icon Nick Cave wrote and recorded with The National's Bryce Dessner, isn't incorporated into the movie that bears its name; it's a closing-credits number all the way. But it does directly and unmistakably expound on ideas explored in the film — a life lived, dark visions of death, an accumulation of traumas and wonders — in ways that feel well-suited to Train Dreams, and to Cave's ever-sonorous voice.
It is, like the film it accompanies, a mood — one better suited to the closing moments of Train Dreams than to, say, a telecast viewed by hundreds of millions of people. But the song itself works extremely well, and it's particularly effective when consumed in the movie's final bittersweet moments. If Clint Bentley's sad and lovely film moved you, then the song almost certainly will, too.
3. "Sweet Dreams of Joy," Viva Verdi!, performed by Ana María Martinez (Nicholas Pike, songwriter)
The most left-field entry in this category, "Sweet Dreams of Joy" was written for a documentary almost no one has seen. (It can be screened via Jolt, whose existence suggests a world in which new streaming services must be named for '90s energy drinks. They were either gonna go with "Jolt" or "Surge+.") Viva Verdi! follows occupants of an Italian retirement home for musicians — made possible by the composer Giuseppe Verdi, who died in 1901 — as they discuss their lives and mentor young artists. The lilting "Sweet Dreams of Joy" plays briefly at an opportune moment, roughly midway through the film, then rolls over the closing credits.
The song itself functions as a marvelous and approachable gateway for the opera-curious, composed by Nicholas Pike and performed by the estimable soprano Ana María Martinez. Is it new? Nope, written and released in 2017. How is it eligible to win an Oscar in 2026? It was written for the film, which took so long to see daylight that most of its subjects have since died. Does it belong in this field? Absolutely, and it's a shame that such a little-heard song — its combined YouTube views number in the low tens of thousands — won't get more of a showcase on Sunday night. Does it have a chance of winning? None whatsoever.
2. "I Lied to You," Sinners, performed by Miles Caton (Raphael Saadiq & Ludwig Goransson, songwriters)
From here on out, there's no wrong answer: Either of this year's top two nominated original songs would be the slam-dunk winner in most iterations of this category, dating back decades. In fact, if you were to remove strategy from the nominations equation and simply select the five best original songs to appear in movies in 2025, this category would consist entirely of music from KPop Demon Hunters and Sinners. (As others have noted, surprising parallels connect the two films beyond their status as pieces of original storytelling, left-field cultural phenomena and movies with stellar soundtracks.)
"I Lied to You" provides Sinners' centerpiece, as Miles Caton performs a blues song that sprawls out to address music's way of connecting humanity's past, present and future. As a piece of audacious filmmaking — and a lesson in music history — it forms a truly unforgettable scene, beautifully directed and shot. As a song, it does important work in clarifying what Caton's character is all about and why his fate in the film matters. In every way, the song is central to the movie that contains it, the way a best original song winner ought to be.
So why is "I Lied to You" ranked No. 2 and not No. 1? Honestly, it's only because one of these top two songs had to be. If anything dings "I Lied to You," it's that the song itself is just one element that elevates the scene it encompasses; the audio without the visuals is powerful, but the visuals make it transcendent. If the category were "best scene containing an original song," then "I Lied to You" would be the clear winner — even over the many great musical scenes in KPop Demon Hunters.
1. "Golden," KPop Demon Hunters, performed by EJAE, Audrey Nuna & Rei Ami (EJAE, Mark Sonnenblick, Joong Gyu Kwak, Yu Han Lee, Hee Dong Nam, Jeong Hoon Seo & Teddy Park, songwriters)
It's a testament to KPop Demon Hunters that its seventh-best song would have blown away every entry in last year's field. It's not just that the film's songs are famously strong; they also advance the plot, help define the characters and more-than-credibly live up to the movie's premise that music is powerful enough to serve as the battlefield on which good can defeat evil.
Consider the assignment, if your job is to write HUNTR/X's signature hit, "Golden." The song has to be good enough that, in both the real world and the world of the film, it would become an instant phenomenon. It has to develop the characters, while setting up the lead's central internal conflict. It has to anchor the film: establish what these singers are capable of, who they are and how much power their music possesses. If this song isn't strong enough to become a legit sensation — if it's not ingratiating enough to, say, top the Billboard Hot 100 for eight weeks — then the movie isn't what it is. That's a seemingly impossible bar to clear, and "Golden" soars right on (up, up, up) over it.
There's a case to be made that "Golden" isn't actually KPop Demon Hunters' best song — consider, for example, "What It Sounds Like," which had to live up to a similarly lofty standard while soundtracking the film's final battle, or "Your Idol," which deconstructs the power of a pop song to seduce. But that's not what this ranking is about. The studio submitted "Golden" (and only "Golden") for consideration, and even against one of the strongest fields in ages, it's a worthy winner.
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