“Jack Nicholson was sitting about six feet away”: When Elliott Smith was forced to play the 1998 Academy Awards
Throughout the history of popular music, large numbers of the people who have risen to the top have been extroverts who are built specifically to be able to handle fame. Elliott Smith, on the other hand, couldn’t have been more unfortunately unsuited to being in the limelight.
Perhaps seen as more of a cult figure in the years since his passing in 2003, Smith was at one point being touted as the next great American songwriter, with a style not too dissimilar from a range of other tragic figures like Tim Buckley, Nick Drake and Kurt Cobain. Obviously, drawing comparisons from these reluctant stars was only going to drive Smith to be even more fame-avoidant, but that didn’t stop him from working hard at his craft and producing some of the most beautifully intimate works of the late ‘90s and early 2000s.
Smith simply wanted to make music without being put on a pedestal or being pressured to fit into the world’s image of him as the archetypal troubled rock star, and so for him to have contributed to the soundtrack of a major Hollywood film in 1997 may have come as a surprise to those who weren’t expecting him to step forth into the limelight.
‘Miss Misery’ was a song that Smith handed over to director Gus Van Sant after he asked for permission to use his music in his upcoming film, Good Will Hunting. Van Sant hadn’t given Smith any sort of brief, nor had he asked him to compose any original music, but ended up with an unreleased song that Smith had written specifically for the film after watching a rough cut.
The film would go on to be a major success, launching the careers of stars and co-writers Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, but it also thrust Smith into the uncomfortable position of being a significant part of such a cultural phenomenon, with ‘Miss Misery’ eventually earning him a nomination for the Academy Award for ‘Best Original Song’. As a result, he also received an invitation to perform the song live at the award ceremony, which, for someone as nervous and reluctant to be under such close scrutiny as he was, was a daunting prospect.
Initially, Smith declined the invitation based on the strict rules that producers had put in place for him to follow, but after a significant amount of coaxing, with him being told that the song would be performed live on the night, regardless of whether he was the one singing, he gave in to their demands and performed alongside a live orchestral backing.
The entire night was surreal to Smith, with him mentioning to reporters prior to the performance that he had only attended as an excuse to wear his white suit, and the fact that he was bullied into standing up to perform rather than playing from his preferred seated position only made it more of an anomaly for him.
However, nothing managed to set the nerves off in Smith more than the sight of a famous face in the audience, as he revealed in an interview with Under the Radar in 2003 that he immediately found himself regretting how he’d talked himself into such a situation.
“I walked out and Jack Nicholson was sitting about six feet away,” he recalled, “so I avoided that area and I looked up at the balcony in the back and sang the song.”
‘Miss Misery’ is perhaps now the most immediately recognisable song in Smith’s catalogue as a result of Good Will Hunting, and while it didn’t win, losing out to clear and obvious winner Celine Dion with ‘My Heart Will Go On’ from Titanic, it’s perhaps one of the greatest songs to have ever been given the nod by the Academy, whether Smith liked it or not.
