Ahead of the 2025 Oscars on Sunday, one nominee is hoping to finally win the coveted award from the Academy for the first time after 16 nominations.
Diane Warren is up for best original song for "The Journey" from "The Six Triple Eight," which is her 16th Oscar nomination in her career and could potentially be her first win, not counting her Honorary Oscar she received in 2022.
"The Journey" was sung by Academy Award winner H.E.R.
Oscar nominee Diane Warren reacts to losing home in LA fires
After finding out about her nomination, Warren told "Good Morning America" that the song is "special" to her.
"I think to me [it is] one of my best songs," she said about "The Journey."
"I love the movie and you never know what's going to happen," she added about the upcoming Oscars ceremony. "I'm just so excited."
Warren's own journey to winning an Oscar began when she started writing music as a teenager. With the encouragement of her father, she continued to pursue music and worked on the Lauren Branigan's "Solitaire" in 1983, which appeared in the film "Two of a Kind" with John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John. It also rose to No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
In 1985, Warren earned her first major hit for the song "Rhythm of the Night" by DeBarge, which appeared in "The Last Dragon." The hit helped launch her career and led to her writing songs for many music legends, including Mariah Carey, Aretha Franklin, Whitney Houston, Gloria Estefan and Toni Braxton. Warren also wrote Cher's 1989 hit song, "If I Could Turn Back Time."
Warren's first Oscar nomination was in 1987 for the song "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" from the 1986 film "Mannequin." She lost to "(I've Had) The Time of My Life" from "Dirty Dancing."
"This was the first song I was ever nominated for an Oscar for," she told The Los Angeles Times in 2018. "It was also my first No. 1 song on the Billboard charts. I wrote it with my friend Albert Hammond. Starship recorded it. We were supposed to write a wedding song for a man...and a mannequin? Somehow, we achieved that and this song has stood the test of time and the movie has become a guilty pleasure classic and evidently a favorite of mannequins everywhere."
Then in 1996, she wrote Celine Dion's song "Because You Loved Me" for the film "Up Close and Personal." Warren told the LA Times that while the song was a "tribute to Robert Redford's character by Michelle Pfeiffer's character" in the film, she also wrote it as a "thank you letter" to her dad for his belief in her music.
Oscars 2025: Full list of nominationsDespite positive reviews from critics, including her first Grammy award for best song written specifically for a motion picture or television, Warren lost the Oscar that year to Andrew Lloyd Webber's "You Must Love Me" from "Evita."
Warren would continue to be nominated in 1997 for her song "How Do I Live" from "Con Air," in 1998 for Aerosmith's "I Don't Want to Miss a Thing" from "Armageddon" and in 1999 for "Music of My Heart" from "Music of the Heart."
Following another loss in 2001 for her song "There You'll Be" from "Pearl Harbor," she received her star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame that same year. The songwriter also continued to write music for Beyoncé, Jessica Simpson, LeAnn Rimes, Lindsay Lohan and Jennifer Hudson, to name a few.
She was nominated for an Oscar again in 2014 for "Grateful" from the film "Beyond the Lights," but lost to John Stephens and Lonnie Lynn's song "Glory" from "Selma."
Since then, she has been nominated each consecutive year for best original song at the Oscars, including this year.
In 2017, she told Larry King that she thought she'd win the Oscar in 2016 for the song, "Til It Happens To You," which was sung by Lady Gaga in the 2015 documentary "The Hunting Ground." The Oscar that year ultimately went to Jimmy Napes and Sam Smith for "Writing's on the Wall" from "Spectre."
"I think everyone thought I'd win, including me," Warren said at the time, but added, "My song had such a life of its own, I think it will last a long time."
This year, critics have mixed prediction on who will take best original song, but some have predicted it could go to "El Mal" from "Emilia Pérez" after Clément Ducol and Camille Dalmais won the Golden Globe and the Critics Choice Award.
The "Emilia Pérez" song, "Mi Camino" by Ducol and Dalmais is also nominated, as well as "Like A Bird" Abraham Alexander and Adrian Quesada from "Sing Sing" and Elton John's "Never Too Late" from his 2024 documentary of the same name.
Warren has said that "it's a big deal to be nominated." In an interview with "Academy Greenroom" in 2023, Warren spoke about the honor that comes with a nomination.
"Five songs are picked, only five songs," she said, comparing it to how many songs receive nominations at the Grammys in its many categories. "Think of all the songs released all year and all the movies. They only pick five. If I'm one of those, man -- that's winning."
The 2025 Oscars will take place Sunday, March 2, airing live on ABC and streaming live on Hulu beginning at 7 p.m. ET.
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