There aren’t many precedents in pop music for the Billie Eilish-Finneas pairing when it comes to brother and sister performing or songwriting duos. But in the world of film music, it might not be too early to consider a comparison with a very famous married couple: Alan and Marilyn Bergman, the long-reigning king and queen of film theme songs. The Bergmans weren’t a fully self-contained songwriting unit; they worked primarily as lyricists, collaborating with outside composers such as Michel Legrand or Marvin Hamlisch on Oscar-winning material like “The Windmills of Your Mind”, “The Way We Were” and the song score for “Yentl”. But it’s their names that are synonymous with film scores like few others. Could the O’Connells be following in their footsteps?
It’s far too early to tell, with only a handful of film songs to their credit in their still-nascent careers (including lesser-known contributions to “Roma” and Pixar’s boy-band comedy “Turning Red”). But they certainly got off to a flying start in claiming such a legacy by winning an Oscar for “No Time to Die”, the best Bond theme of the modern era. (A pretty heady achievement, considering Eilish was 4 years old when Daniel Craig took over as the franchise’s leading man). That seemed like a precocious one-off, until the duo came back with a “Barbie” theme that easily surpasses even their Bond song, accomplished as that was. Nobody really wants them to give up their day jobs to work full-time in Hollywood, but film music… well, it somehow feels like what they were made for.
“What Was I Made For?” might actually be the film’s closer, since Aimee Mann’s “Save Me” made the landing for “Magnolia” at the end of the ’90s, at least when we’re talking about dramatic climaxes that wouldn’t register as vividly on the emotional Richter scale without such a touching musical punchline. But there’s another late-90s film song that this one recalls in terms of its potential awards-circuit impact. Eilish and Finnea’s song has a chance of becoming the first since “My Heart Will Go On” from 1997’s “Titanic” to win both the Oscar for best song and the Grammy for record of the year, a double honour that’s long overdue.
Believe it or not, only three film songs have ever won both awards. That feat was achieved by Henry Mancini’s back-to-back hits ‘Moon River’ and ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ in 1961-62. But it took another 35 years for it to happen again, with the ballad sung by Celine Dion, and it hasn’t been repeated in the quarter of a century since. Trivia buffs may point out that, apart from the Grammy for song of the year, there have been half a dozen other film themes that have managed to win the Grammy for song of the year and also the Oscar: “Shadow of Your Smile” (from “The Sandpiper”), “The Way We Were”, “You Light Up My Life”, “Evergreen”, “A Whole New World” and “Streets of Philadelphia”. But even these date back to the depths of the pre-Titanic 20th century. The Grammy/Oscar twain couldn’t even be brought back together for a “Let It Go” or a “Shallow” to win double top honours.
