How Bruce Springsteen completely fluked his Oscar win
While his 20 Grammy Award wins are well-earned, Bruce Springsteen recently confessed that his only Oscar was stumbled upon almost by accident.
He was already a massive star by the time he won his Academy Award. A heartland rocker veteran whose Born in the USA Billboard behemoth was still a fairly recent memory, Springsteen’s legendary stature was well established in the early 1990s, if having encountered some career wobbles.
His famous E Street Band had been dissolved to fan displeasure, the Human Touch and Lucky Town LP twofer was met with a mixed reception, and his MTV Unplugged performance was given a critical kicking for boasting a very much electric and plugged-in backing band for much of the set.
It was Hollywood that would inspire some of that old Boss magic. In early 1993, director Jonathan Demme was still basking in the success of The Silence of the Lambs two years earlier. Swapping crime horror for a legal drama tackling the stigma surrounding the HIV/AIDS epidemic and its inflaming of homophobia at the time, Demme knew Philadelphia’s socially conscious feature needed a theme tune handled by an artist who could go for the heart without lapsing into mawkish sentimentality beneath the film’s sensitive subject matter.
Naturally, Springsteen received the call. The ‘Born to Run’ singer was only handed a summary of Philadelphia and a couple of minutes of opening footage, but Springsteen duly retreated to his Thrill Hill West home studio in Beverly Hills to pen a theme.
There was some trepidation, as Springsteen didn’t feel all that confident in the scoring game, but eventually a demo was mustered. Scored with phantasmic keyboards and a hypnotic drum machine, the austere ‘Streets of Philadelphia’ perfectly matched its lyrical skulk through the dying thoughts of a man’s mortal reckoning as he wanders the namesake city living with HIV/AIDS and navigating the cruel ostracisation that came with it.
The raw demo proved so moving that Demme and his wife were reportedly moved to tears upon first hearing it. There was enough haunted power in ‘Streets of Philadelphia’s ostensible demo that Demme vetoed Springsteen’s ‘proper’ full record, having corralled a four-man team at A&M Studios and submitted it as the final cut. Springsteen was on board with Demme’s decision. Evoking some of Nebraska’s desolate atmosphere, Springsteen eagerly swapped the video’s band version with the demo and even re-shot sections of the video to better complement its revised, sombre soundtrack.
Philadelphia would be showered with rave reviews, and ‘Streets of Philadelphia’ would stand as the last highest-charting single for the rest of his career at number nine on the Hot 100, as well as earning Springsteen the Academy Award for ‘Best Original Song’ in 1994. It was a landmark moment for the Boss, despite calling the single “kind of a fluke” at his recent appearance at the Tribeca Festival when picking up the Harry Belafonte Voices for Social Justice Award.
“It was really one of those things,” Springsteen told U2’s Bono in conversation for the event. “If you do good things, good things happen. So Jonathan Demme, who is deeply missed and was a wonderful, wonderful man, incredible filmmaker, kind of invited me into his film, and I guess we lucked out.”
