Oscars 2025: an analysis of the Best Original Song nominees

‘Tis the season – awards season! With the 2025 Oscars – a.k.a. Academy Awards – right around the corner, we thought it would be fun to take a look at the nominees for the Best Original Song award and do a little analysis, much like we just did for the GRAMMYs.

There are five nominees from across four films, encompassing multiple genres, so while this doesn’t give us a huge data set to draw significant averages from, we can definitely listen to and reflect on the songs. While we’re at it we can certainly compare how the measurable aspects of the songs compare to what we hear, and maybe create a basis for comparison in the broader context of commercial music.

Follow along with this analysis using  RX , the award-winning audio cleanup software trusted by top engineers to quickly remove background noise and restore damaged audio.

 
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What is the Best Original Song Oscar? 

Like the GRAMMYs, different Academy Awards are presented for very specific criteria. So, from Wikipedia, here are the criteria for Best Original Song.

“The Academy Award for Best Original Song… is presented to the songwriters who have composed the best original song written specifically for a film.”

In other words, for a song to be eligible, it must:

1. Consist of original words and music
2. Be written specifically for the motion picture
3. Be clearly audible and intelligible in the film
4. Be a substantive rendition of both lyrics and melody
5. Be used either in the body of the film or as the first music cue in the end credits

A few factors that preclude a song being included for consideration include:

1. Songs that rely on samples or reworked material
2. Cover versions, remixes, and parodies
3. Existing songs from stage musicals adapted to film (notably Wicked, this year)

Song analysis process

After my last article analyzing the 2025 GRAMMY Record of the Year nominees, we saw a few common questions that I’d like to address up front.

• What sources were used for analysis? For each of these songs, I purchased and downloaded the lossless, high resolution – when available – file from the Qobuz store. This ensures that no streaming codecs or other hiccups get in the way.
• Do the numbers include any normalization? No. All analysis is done at the full, mastered level. That said, music discovery trends tell us that something like 85% of casual listeners listen with normalization turned on. So, just because something is mastered “loud” doesn’t mean that’s how people will experience it next to something “less loud.” In fact, in a predominantly loudness normalized playback world, I would argue that raw LUFS measurements tell us more about density than they do “loudeness” – but that’s an article for another time.
• What about Atmos? Don’t those need to be at -18 LUFSi? Yes, the loudest Atmos mix on an album needs to not exceed -18 LUFS, integrated. In fact, in some cases where both Atmos and stereo mixes of a song exist, we have an unusual and interesting opportunity to compare more and less dynamic versions of a song. For this analysis though, only stereo versions were used.

So, in short, this analysis uses downloaded lossless files with no normalization – or any other processing – applied. They are as close to what the mastering engineer was listening to as we can get!

You may also notice that I’ve switched up my chosen graphics a bit. The short-term LUFS trace gives us a slightly better idea of what’s actually going on level-wise over time than a waveform does, and while Tonal Balance Control can be great to help make level and EQ decisions while mixing and mastering, the Spectrum Analyser from RX is a little better at showing us the average tonal balance across a whole song.

The nominees

Before we dive in, there are a few facets of mixing for film that I want to point out.

In this analysis, we’ll see a few songs where no mixing or mastering engineers are listed. In some ways, that’s not so unusual for music written specifically for movies. The process of mixing audio for a film is substantially different than that of just mixing a song for commercial release – if you’re interested, you can learn more in this 4-part miniseries of articles.

In short though, in a feature film production there are three primary disciplines, each with multiple sub-disciplines, and for each of these there may be one or more responsible individuals. For example – and this is by no means a comprehensive list – here is some of the basic hierarchy:

• Re-recording mixer
• Dialogue
  • Dialogue editor
  • ADR mixer
• Music
  • Music editor
  • Scoring mixer
• Effects
  • Sound effects editor
  • Foley artist/mixer

So yes, while someone certainly mixed all of the following original songs, there wasn’t always a traditional mastering engineer, and how the music was integrated into the film – under dialogue, cutting through effects, etc. – may have certainly had an impact on mix decisions.

So, with that out of the way and no further ado, here are the nominees for Best Original Song, along with my technical and musical analysis of them.

1. “El Mal” from Emilia Pérez

Music: Clément Ducol, and Camille | Lyrics: Clément Ducol, Camille, and Jacques Audiard | Producers: Not Listed | Mixing: Not Listed | Mastering: Not Listed

This is a super cool and dynamic song! From the almost whisper-rapped verses to the huge bass drops leading into the pounding choruses, it has a lot to love. With an integrated level of “only” -11.2 LUFS and a maximum short-term level of -8.3 that comes right at the pounding climax, this song has a lot of room for the transients to really have an impact. And honestly, this makes sense in a film.

Films are typically mixed with much lower levels overall – often closer to -23 LUFS integrated – so in the context of the film,  the only reason to apply limiting to the song is to get the sound you want, not to achieve some arbitrary “loudness.” This is as it should be, in my opinion, and here I think the result sounds great!

The 5 kHz region feels a bit set back. Perhaps that’s because of where the song needed to sit in the context of the rest of the film mix, but in isolation it feels a bit muffled for such an energetic song.

2. “The Journey” from The Six Triple Eight

Music and Lyrics: Diane Warren | Producer: H.E.R | Mixing: Miki Tsutsumi | Mastering: Colin Leonard

In contrast to “El Mal,” this song is a much more typical commercial music master with a higher integrated level and more controlled transients.That said, it is done quite cleanly which makes it an interesting example to compare against a track like “El Mal.” Try listening to them both on streaming with normalization engaged, and you can get a very clear idea of why I say raw LUFS tells us more about density than it does “loudness” – and yes, I will keep using quotation marks around that word.

In common with “el Mal,” there’s a similar dip up high, this time just over 5k. Maybe there was a similar motivation here, or maybe that’s just an emerging trend. Time will tell.

3. “Like a Bird” from Sing Sing

Music and Lyrics: Abraham Alexander and Adrian Quesada | Producers: Abraham Alexander, Adrian Quesada | Mixing: Not Listed | Mastering: Not Listed

Confession: when I listened to this song I started to wonder if there was an EQ enabled somewhere in my playback chain that shouldn’t be, or if my ears were unknowingly a bit congested. Again, there’s this kind of low-mid buildup and high-end veil. But no, my playback chain is in good order and my normal reference tracks sound great. Either this is some facet of music for film that I’m just not as aware of – not living in that world – or mastering engineers do have some value after all.

Tonal balance aside, this is another great – and different – example of what dynamism can sound like when absolute level isn’t a concern. Here we have a mix that’s similarly punchy to “El Mal,” but with some intentional saturation and grit baked into the drum production and mix. So far what we have then is three mixes that exemplify how transient punch, density, and grit can truly be three distinctly controllable facets of a mix. 

4. “Mi Camino” from Emilia Pérez

Music and Lyrics: Camille and Clément Ducol | Producers: Not Listed | Mixing: Not Listed | Mastering: Not Listed

Numbers aside, there are two really notable elements of this song and mix to my ear: first, the more balanced tonality that we’re accustomed to in popular music, and second the astounding width, particularly between 200 and 2k Hz.

If I’m going to nitpick, the upper-mids of the vocal feel a touch overcompressed and forward to me, but I still prefer the tonal balance here to that of the other songs. The width just about holds together, although if you hear the song in mono it is a very different mix. It also suffers a bit at the hands of lossy streaming codecs – like Spotify’s OGG – which tend to be more aggressive in their filtering of side-channel content to achieve bitrate requirements. 

5. “Never too Late” from Elton John: Never Too Late

Music and Lyrics: Elton John, Brandi Carlile, Andrew Watt and Bernie Taupin | Producer: Andrew Watt | Mixing: Serban Ghenea | Mastering: Matt Colton

I am conflicted on this one. Serban is an undisputed king in the world of mixing, I love tons of his work, and I have a great deal of respect for Matt Colton – his work on Disclosure’s 2023 album Alchemy is absolutely ace – but I just do not love the way this song sounds.

It’s hard not to draw comparisons between “Never Too Late” and one of Elton’s absolute classics, “Tiny Dancer.” They’re in the same key, at very nearly the same tempo, with largely similar arrangements – even aspects of the melodies share some commonalities. But when you listen to them next to each other, I don’t feel that “Never Too Late” holds up as well as “Tiny Dancer.”

There’s a build-up and resonance around 780 Hz in the vocals, and the degree of crush and distortion that pokes out at times just feels out of place on a sentimental duet. In fact, I had a play around and see if I could make it sound a bit more open, and between De-clip in RX, and some of Ozone’s spectral processors, I was able to arrive at something I enjoyed a bit more.

Lastly, before anyone asks, that crazy spike between about 17.6 and 19 kHz in the Spectrum Analyzer is most likely from a console, possibly a VCA or the automation data channel.

Reflecting on the analysis

Honestly, for five songs – two of which were from the same film – there’s a great degree of variety and some important takeaways.

First and foremost, I love how the first three songs so clearly demonstrate that just because you want grit and edge in your drums, you don’t have to crush the master. And just because you want a dense pop master with the drums packed down into the body of the song doesn’t mean you have to have a ton of distortion. And if you want something that's big and punchy without grit and crunch, that can still work perfectly well on streaming right next to everything else.

Second, the Elton John song shows us that even the greats may sometimes be susceptible to outside pressures, or have a bit of a miss, and it hopefully reminds us that even when we’re after a modern sound, it can be wise to respect our musical heritage.

So that’s it for today, but keep an eye out for more analyses down the road, and be sure to let us know over on Instagram if there are any particular charts, genres, or songs you’d like to see analyzed.

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