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

The best movie songs are the ones that illuminate character, summarize the story or otherwise add a new dimension to the film experience. More than in most years, in 2025 there was a bumper crop of songs that did just that.

The most obvious examples are the two songs Stephen Schwartz wrote for “Wicked: For Good.” There were no new songs in last year’s “Wicked,” but the expansion of the second act (from 45 minutes on stage to two hours in the new film) “gave us the opportunity to put onscreen things that happened offstage or were only implied,” Schwartz says.

“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.”

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. resident struggling to establish herself, on Instagram and reached out directly to her.

“He really wanted that moment to be special, something that encapsulated that journey,” she says. “King David (Washington’s character) is trying to find himself again and why he went into music in the first place. The song stood for soulful, true artistry, something that he had lost touch with for a very long time.”

She wrote nearly a dozen songs before settling on the one for the film. “Spike and I were on the phone every day trying to get this down,” she adds. “He encouraged me to tell my story, and bring my life experience into the role and the song, so everything I’m saying is very raw and real to me.”

In stark contrast to Aiyana-Lee stands veteran Diane Warren, who has amassed 16 Oscar nominations over nearly 40 years of movie songwriting (and won an honorary Oscar in 2022 “for her genius, generosity and passionate commitment to the power of song in film”).

She penned “Dear Me” during the making of “Relentless,” a documentary about her single-minded determination to make songwriting her career and the success that has followed. “Music saved my life in many ways,” Warren says. “I didn’t have an easy time growing up.

“I wanted to write a song to that girl that sat in that room alone and felt like the world was against her,” she notes. “I wanted to write a love letter to her. I wanted to say, ‘You know what? You don’t see it now, it doesn’t feel like it’s going to be okay, but it will be.'”

Warren says that it’s her “most personal song—but here’s the irony: it’s maybe my most universal song. I’ve gotten more response to this song than almost any song I can recall. It’s touching people.”