Six days before the 98th Academy Awards, at the Eastwood Scoring Stage at Warner Bros. Studios in Los Angeles, Oscars music director Michael Bearden is running a live orchestra through a selection of bumper music and walk-on/walk-off songs. It’s the second day of pre-rehearsals for the upcoming telecast, and the assembled musicians gracefully span eras and genres as easily as one would tune radio channels, running through some 20 pieces of music in 30 minutes, Bearden confidently at the helm. “Rhythm can go off, just free,” he directs at one point. “Nice. Crisp. I like that,” he tells the orchestra during another passage.
While the Oscars ceremony is of course all about the nominated films and stars, as in the movies themselves, music crucially sets the tone. And as Bearden tells Rolling Stone, there is a tremendous amount of work for the orchestra to master during the show’s three-and-a-half-hour runtime.
“I think last year we had 111 to 112 pieces of music,” he says by Zoom a couple of days later. “It’s a lot.” He adds that he’d spent the morning with a completely new piece for this year’s performance — something the orchestra hadn’t even played when I was observing just a few days prior. Bearden calls the final program “a constant moving target” which continues to evolve days before the show.
Bearden feeling the moment in pre-rehearsals.
Ye Fan/The Academy
And it’s not just the interstitial music Bearden and Company have to get right. This year also sees the return of Best Original Song performances, with two nominees being highlighted: “I Lied to You” from Sinners and “Golden” from KPop Demon Hunters. Bearden says he’s been working closely with the performers of each song — Miles Caton and Raphael Saadiq lead an all-star crew which includes Buddy Guy, Brittany Howard, and Shaboozey for “I Lied to You,” while Ejae, Audrey Nuna, and Rei Ami, the singers behind Huntr/x, take on “Golden” — on how they want to conduct their presentations. “I always like for the artists to know that this is the Oscars, so let’s make it even grander, in a way that doesn’t diminish what you want to do,” he says. “We can make it a little bolder than they know.”
This is Bearden’s second consecutive time serving as the Oscars’ music director, but the maestro is a longtime veteran of the show, having played the event as a musician multiple times. He’s also conducted multiple Emmys broadcasts and served as music director for pop luminaries including Lady Gaga, Madonna, Jennifer Lopez, and Michael Jackson. So he definitely knows how to go big.
“The Oscars has a vocabulary, a really elegant and posh language, about it. And so you can’t just put any piece of music in the Oscars,” he says. “It has to fit for the moment of celebrating cinema” and “sound good on the biggest show in Hollywood.”
At the pre-rehearsals, Bearden and the orchestra run through parts of songs from The Mandalorian, St. Elmo’s Fire, and The King’s Speech, hits like Seal’s “Kiss From a Rose” and Wilson Phillips’ “Hold On,” and favorites by artists including Stevie Wonder. Though it’s only the second day of pre-rehearsals, it all feels like a well-coordinated ballet. Bearden, dressed in all black and a pair of high tops, turns behind him to a bench where he grabs the next song sheet, and the orchestra quickly launches into recording the next passage. Some songs inspire a bit of dancing, like the bossa nova-tinged “’S Wonderful,” a Gershwin classic from the musical Funny Face, which finds Bearden and others in the room moving to the beat.
Choosing what to perform would seem a daunting task, given the world’s vast musical catalog and how many pieces are required for a show like the Oscars. But for Bearden, it’s second nature. “As a music director, one of my favorite words is ‘discernment’ — you have to know what to play and where,” he says, adding that he’s worked with more than 530 artists over his decades-long career. To stay fresh, he tries every day to listen to 10 new songs he hasn’t previously heard. That discernment he says, “informs me of what will go where and how … There’s no secret formula to this.”
Bearden with “Golden” songwriter Ejae.
Ye Fan/The Academy
The music isn’t entirely his choice, though. Mostly, the songs he’s working with are written by others, so his team needs clearance to perform them for the telecast — which they don’t always get. “So if something actually works, but we don’t get permission, then I have to choose something else … It’s a lot that goes into this.”
There are also time constraints, mere seconds when it comes to the pieces that lead into commercials. “I have to pick the part of the song that moves people and that will move me, and that’s recognizable,” Bearden says. “And they go, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s, that’s that song.’ Then [producers are] off to commercial, and then we’re out. You only get to hear 12 seconds, 10 seconds of it, but I got you, because I chose the core of the song, that emotional part that gets to you right away.”
For this year’s installment, there are several big music moments planned, including the In Memoriam segment, which Bearden arranged. The song choices are staying closely under wraps for now, but Bearden says, “There was a lot of careful work with me and my team and the whole Oscars team to take this really seriously and to really want to make this right and honor the people that have passed on.” This past year saw many legends lost, including Diane Keaton, Robert Duvall, Diane Ladd, and Rob Reiner, to name just a handful.
There are still a few days before showtime when we speak, and Bearden says while tweaks during the rehearsals may still come, one thing will remain: All of the music selections will move people emotionally. “Music, for me, is the most powerful language on Earth,” he says. “I choose music that moves souls. That’s one of my favorite sayings I say to whoever I’m working with — once we do all the prep work and we’re ready to hit the stage and they’re announcing us, I always tell them, ‘Let’s go move some souls.’”
