Josh Spiegel
“Well, thank heavens there wasn’t a song in The English Patient,” Andrew Lloyd Webber joked, opening his acceptance speech for the Best Original Song Oscar in 1996. He was playfully ribbing the fact that the Anthony Minghella-directed epic was sweeping every category that year, and no doubt would have ran the table further if it could have. Even though that line may have stood the test of time for some awards watchers, the song in question did not. That was “You Must Love Me,” written by Webber and Tim Rice for the film adaptation of their stage musical Evita. Sometimes, the Academy gets it right with Best Original Song, but too often, they miss the mark. This week marks the 30th anniversary of another nominee that year, the song that should have won. It’s a song so crucial it shares the film’s title: That Thing You Do!.
Before Tom Hanks fully embraced his role as America’s dad and worked almost exclusively in projects related to World War II or the space race, he made his directorial debut with That Thing You Do!, a movie about a one-hit wonder band, fittingly titled The Wonders, and their brief rise to and fall from fame in the early 1960s in the wake of Beatlemania. Hanks plays a supporting role as the band’s eventual manager, and is joined by a winning ensemble, including Tom Everett Scott (a spitting image for Hanks), Steve Zahn, and Liv Tyler, who make this movie a charming period piece.
Arguably, it would not be a beloved cult hit for elder Millennials like this writer and many others if it wasn’t for the Oscar-nominated title song, written by the late Adam Schlesinger of Fountains of Wayne. The challenge is immense: the song has to sound appropriate to the era, it has to sound like an early Beatles song without actually being a Beatles song, it has to be catchy enough that the audience would buy the song being successful within the world of the film, and it has to be the right kind of catchy without being obnoxious. Schlesinger threaded the needle perfectly, in spite of the fact that, per a 2016 interview, he wrote the song “as a personal exercise” and wasn’t expecting it to be chosen. (Fountains of Wayne released their debut album the same year, so his fame was still on the rise.)
Hindsight being 20/20, it’s easy to look at the year’s nominees and wonder why on Earth the Academy gave the Original Song Oscar to Evita. (The Oscar could just as easily have gone to “Because You Loved Me” from Up Close and Personal or “I Finally Found Someone” from The Mirror Has Two Faces.) But “That Thing You Do!” is in inexplicably fine company, among songs nominated for the Best Original Song Oscar that absolutely should have won. The most egregious example is “Rainbow Connection” from The Muppet Movie, which lost in 1979 to “It Goes Like It Goes” from Norma Rae. (We all know that song, right? Right?)
In 1999, one of the most stacked categories of Best Original Song went in the wrong way. Nominees included “Blame Canada” from South Park: Bigger, Longer, and Uncut; “When She Loved Me” from Toy Story 2; and “Save Me” from Magnolia. So naturally, the winner was “You’ll Be In My Heart” from Tarzan. (Yes, some people are wildly passionate fans of Phil Collins’ songs from Tarzan, but his is absolutely the worst of the four 1999 songs mentioned above.)
Sometimes, the fault lies in the studios pushing for certain songs. In 2021, Encanto walked away empty-handed, because Disney selected as its nominee, “Dos Oruguitas.” Would “We Don’t Talk About Bruno” have been victorious over the actual winner, “No Time to Die”? We can only wonder. The same may be true for the previous time Disney and Lin-Manuel Miranda lost, with Moana and “How Far I’ll Go.” That’s an excellent song, but what if “You’re Welcome” was the nominee instead? (The winner that year was “City of Stars” from La La Land.) Yet more often than not, the voters veer in the wrong direction potentially to ensure a more mature-seeming victor. Consider 2014, when the song “Glory” from Selma won over the deliciously catchy “Everything is Awesome” from The Lego Movie. One of these songs is more important because the film in which it existed was more important. But you can only hum one of those off the top of your head.
And so it goes for “That Thing You Do!,” a song all but embedded permanently on the DNA of anyone who saw the film in the fall of 1996 and fell hard for this enjoyable tale of underdogs who get a taste of fame before moving on with their lives. Schlesinger never got an Oscar, but would net a couple Emmys and a Grammy before his tragic death in 2020 of COVID. As the youth say, even if he wrote the song as a personal exercise, Adam Schlesinger understood the assignment of “That Thing You Do!,” and in the process, wrote one of the great early Beatles riffs. It’s a shame the Oscars never honored him for it appropriately, but he wound up in good company.
“That Thing You Do!” is available for digital rental or purchase.
