Best Original ‘Huh?’: How songwriter Diane Warren became the queen of confusing Oscar nominations
The songwriter has spent more than four decades conjuring overwrought bangers by the bucketful – power ballads that plead and mourn and crescendo, the kind irresistible to office parties and chintzy karaoke machines. You haven’t lived until you’ve seen Celine Dion’s “Because You Loved Me” drunkenly warbled by the most overconfident person you know from HR. A handful of Warren’s greatest and best-known tracks for other artists – among them Aerosmith’s “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” and Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” – have also helped make her the most nominated songwriter in Oscar history to never win a competitive trophy. More importantly, though, recent years have turned.
