9. "Moon River," from Breakfast At Tiffany's, 1961
A great song usually doesn't need any vocal acrobatics to make its point. Case in point: this Johnny Mercer/Henry Mancini-penned number written for Audrey Hepburn, a non-singer with considerable vocal limitations. Better singers from Andy Williams to Morrissey have covered it, but the yearning, romantic spirit belongs to the song, not the singer. (Even if nobody has ever figured out what a "huckleberry friend" is.)
10. "Theme From Shaft," from Shaft, 1971
It's rare that a song puts its stamp on an entire decade, but what would the '70s have sounded like without Isaac Hayes' Shaft theme? From the snap of the hi-hat to the funky wah-wah guitar line, the much-imitated song was reworked and rehashed in film and TV scores for years to follow. And yet nothing quite touches the original, which still oozes tough-guy cool. Amazingly (or, sadly, not) Hayes' 1972 win made him the first African-American to win an Oscar outside of an acting category.
11. "I'm Easy," from Nashville, 1975
Robert Altman famously had his Nashville cast members write their own songs for their characters, and while some emerged with parodies of country music's populist simplicity, others produced music as good as anything the real Nashville hit factory churned out in 1975. The movie's best song is Ronee Blakely's aching "Dues," but it's almost matched by the song that won Nashville's only Oscar, "I'm Easy," written and performed by Keith Carradine. The "I'm Easy" scene is also a high point in the film, illuminating the ruthlessness of Carradine's lothario songwriter, who has convinced at least three women that he wrote the song for them.
12. "Last Dance," from Thank God It's Friday, 1978
The "disco musical" Thank God It's Friday is better than people remember—casual observers often confuse it with Can't Stop The Music, which really did suck. And "Last Dance," written by Paul Jabara and sung by Donna Summer, is one of the key reasons T.G.I.F. transcends its '70s-typical "a bunch of people hang out" anti-premise. Late in the film, a mousy Summer steps up to the microphone to belt out "her song," and the club goes wild, validating the anyone-can-be-a-star dreams of a million pop fans, and connecting the much-maligned disco movement to a venerable show-business tradition stretching back to, yes, Gold Diggers Of 1935.
13. "Sooner Or Later (I Always Get My Man)," from Dick Tracy, 1990
Stephen Sondheim's gifts for pop pastiche and sophisticated wordplay are so refined that it's surprising he hasn't been tapped more as a movie composer. For Warren Beatty's comic-strip-scaled Dick Tracy, Sondheim provides a seductive vamper for femme fatale Madonna that's so on-point it could pass for an honest-to-goodness '40s standard. But he also infuses "Sooner Or Later" with his typical love of language, letting the words in the line "sooner is better than later, but lover I'll hover" play off each other like instruments in an orchestra. It's a measure of the song's excellence that it was later retooled for the Sondheim revue Putting It Together, where it stands between—and up to—the classics "Pretty Women" and "Bang!"
14. "Streets Of Philadelphia," from Philadelphia, 1993
A fair case could be made that Neil Young's "Philadelphia" is the better Oscar-nominated song from the Philadelphia soundtrack, but that doesn't detract from the excellence of Bruce Springsteen's "Streets Of Philadelphia," which marries a haunting lyric about corporeal decay to a surprisingly effective pseudo-trip-hop track. At the time, Springsteen was in a relatively fallow period creatively, and trying out different genres in his home studio in order to revive himself. Reportedly, he recorded a whole album in the "Streets Of Philadelphia" style, but he must have shelved it when he realized that the song alone made a stronger statement. When he moans, "My clothes don't fit me no more," he justifies his skeletal sound and encapsulates the ravages of AIDS.
15. "Things Have Changed," from Wonder Boys, 2000
Since 1997's Time Out Of Mind, Bob Dylan has become a master of saying less by saying more. This track fits right beside that autumnal album both musically and lyrically. "Lot of water under the bridge," Dylan sings before doling out the deadpan punchline: "Lot of other stuff too." It's all in the delivery, folks.
16. "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp" from Hustle & Flow, 2005
Hustle & Flow positively dared audiences to leave the theater not humming "It's Hard Out Here For A Pimp," the insanely infectious personal theme song of soulful pimp-turned-rapper Terrence Howard. In another context, Three 6 Mafia's sensitive exploration of a pimp's existential angst might reek of self-parody, but its use in Craig Brewer's atmospheric inspirational drama marked the perfect alchemy of song and film, subject and sound. Not even the overwhelmingly white, stodgy Academy could resist the song's visceral charm, leading to one of the most delightfully unexpected Oscar upsets of all time.
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