This story about Diane Warren first appeared in the Race Begins issue of awards magazine TheWrap.
When she received a phone call in June from Academy president David Rubin, Diane Warren was in the studio with singer Sofia Carson, working on a song called “Applause.” The song, written for the movie “Tell It Like a Woman,” urges women to appreciate themselves: “Give yourself a round of applause, you deserve it.” And when Rubin greeted Warren, the song suddenly took on a whole new meaning.
“He was like, ‘I’m so happy to be able to do this. Congratulations!’” Warren said, looking back on the moment four months later. “I said that?’ He said, ‘You’re going to get an Oscar!’ And I was like, ‘No. This must be a joke'”.
It wasn’t a joke. At the Governors Awards on November 19, Diane Warren will become the first songwriter to be voted for an Honorary Academy Award by the Academy’s Board of Governors. After nearly 40 years in the music business, 32 Top 10 chart hits, three consecutive Songwriter of the Year honors at the Billboard Music Awards, a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, a spot on the Hall of Songwriters of Fame and 13 Academy Awards. With award nominations but no wins, she’s taking home the little man of gold she’s openly coveted for decades.
And when it does, it will most likely become the instant highlight of a career that has already included a variety of hit songs including “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” (Starship), “I Don’t Want to Miss to Thing”. (Aerosmith), “Rhythm of the Night” (DeBarge), “If I Could Turn Back Time” (Cher), “Because You Loved Me” (Celine Dion), “How I Live” (LeAnn Rimes) and “’Til You pass to you” (Lady Gaga).
Mention the honorary Oscar, and the normally blunt Warren is almost at a loss for words. “How cool is that?” she said, sitting at a control panel in a studio at Realsongs, the Hollywood building that houses her studio and office. “Like, I can’t…” She stopped, then started again. “I mean, you know, she hasn’t even hit me yet.”
Another pause, and then her smile faded a bit. “It’s weird. Today marks 20 years since my mom passed away. My mom saw some of my success, but, like…” She shook her head. “I’ll get emotional if I say too much, but I have a feeling my mom and my dad will be there that day, you know? I mean, I’m going to get an Oscar. I haven’t even gotten it.”
Warren’s parents come up a lot when she talks about her songwriting career, because her father was her biggest driver, her mother a relentless skeptic. She started, she said, when she was eight or nine years old, looking at the label of one of her sister’s 45rpm singles. She had the name of the artist, the Drifters, and the song “Up on the Roof.” And under the song title, in parentheses, she said “Goffin-King,” for songwriters Gerry Goffin and Carole King.
“I felt like I wanted to be in brackets,” he said. “I didn’t want to be the singer, I wanted to be the songwriter.” She shrugged her shoulders. “Is it weird to want to be in brackets? I don’t know. I just had a premonition, maybe.
Her father bought her an inexpensive guitar and took her to class, but the instructor told her not to come back because she didn’t want to learn scales. She (she was never a great student at any kind of school). When she was a teenager, she was obsessed with songwriting, inspired by the Southern California radio stations that played a steady diet of the Beatles, Motown and everything in between. Her father would take her to see editorials “when she was 15 and she was an arrogant little piece of shit,” while her mother was less optimistic. She “would play her a song and she’d say, ‘It’s a beautiful song, but go to Ralph’s and see if they give you food for it.'”
Together, her parents gave the rebellious teen the drive to keep going. “My dad believed in me, and that was great,” she said. “But he had to prove it to my mom, and that’s almost more powerful. Especially when all the doors are slammed in your face, there’s something about thinking, ‘I’m going to show you.’ I’m going to be able to go to Ralph’s and buy a lot of groceries.’”
But it took him years to get to that point. “It was overnight success that took forever,” he said. “I had my first hit when I was 29, and I’ve been doing it obsessively since I was 14.” But once she won, she kept going, garnering Oscar nominations for four years in a row from 1996 to 1999 and then going on a crazy streak of seven nominations in eight years starting in 2014.
The pandemic didn’t stop her: Warren continued to go to a Sunset Blvd. office every morning to write, and to the larger Realsongs building around the corner in the afternoons. In fact, she loved the fact that there weren’t other people around her, that she could skip socializing and go straight to writing songs.
In this age of collaboration, she prefers to write alone: ”I think my best songs are the ones I write alone,” she said. “I have my own way of doing it, and I’d rather do it than be in a room with someone trying to write lyrics and sounding like an idiot.” (Her preference of hers for writing solo, and an outspoken, cynical nature that isn’t always evident in her songs, sparked a bit of a social media storm in August when she publicly questioned why Beyoncé had two dozen credited songwriters on her own.) a song).
The industry has changed dramatically since Warren got into it, and she knows it. “I’m still doing well, and thank God for that, but I feel so bad for the people that are coming now,” she said. “I was recently with a big artist whose manager is an executive from a big record company and I said, ‘Why doesn’t your manager sign you to the label?’ And they said, ‘My TikTok numbers aren’t high enough. It’s terrible that they are only looking at TikTok algorithms or data. When she was uploading, the only data that meant anything was: ‘Did that song make you feel anything?’ These poor artists who are coming now don’t have the opportunity”.
By the way, do you remember that song called “Applause” that we told you about at the beginning of this story? The song about female empowerment that Warren was recording when he got a call about the Honorary Oscar?
Well, “Applause” is eligible for an Oscar this year in the Best Original Song category. Diane would like people to vote for her. She may win an honorary Oscar this year, but she doesn’t expect that to lessen her desire to hear her name on Oscar night when she opens the envelope for herself.
“Oh, Nohe said when the subject was raised. “I still want to win one. My Oscar will be alone. He wants a friend from the Oscars to hang out with.”
A shrug. “I will try it this year. I will try next year. I love this time of year, I love the whole process. It’s fun.”
Read more of the Race Begins issue here.
