I’m late to the party on this one, but “Once” won this year’s Academy Award for “Best Music (Song).” Considering three of the five nominees came from the same film, one might cynically say that the field wasn’t all that broad this year, and I suppose it wasn’t. I was happy with the outcome, however — happy that a smaller independent film won, happy that it was a decent song, happy that I’d heard of it before the nominations (I saw the film last autumn and got the soundtrack for Christmas), and happy that it was an Irish film.* You can see the acceptance speech (complete with the disgraceful ignoring of Marketa Irglova) here.

For those who didn’t grow up watching the annual spectacle that is the Oscars, each nominated song is performed over the course of the evening. “Enchanted,” with three nominations in this category, staged lavish productions in keeping with the genre the movie means to satirize. In stark contrast, the performance of “Falling Slowly” was simple and powerful. It was her at the piano, him with his ratty guitar, and the two of them singing together. The Wanderer commented that if the award had been based just on the performances, “Once” still would have won.

If you’d like to see Colin Farrell’s introduction (and Jon Stewart’s introduction of Colin Farrell), you can watch this version. Colin Farrell seems to have studied at the Wanderer’s school of hair care — long and uncombed — and managed to achieve a sort of pirate look for the Oscars. The media wasn’t sure what to do with that other than show it a lot without saying anything about it.

*A friend recommended the film to me because it was 1. highly musical and 2. Irish. The film seems to affect different people in different ways. One woman was upset at the plight of the female lead, that she was an under-appreciated woman of impressive talent condemned to a life of obscurity. Some people couldn’t get away from the fact that the two leads started dating after the filming was over, despite an impressive age difference. The Wanderer and I, however, spent the next few days homesick, as seeing familiar but distant streets and hearing familiar but fading accents reminded us acutely of how far away we were.

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