If, as expected, “Shallow” wins the Oscar for Best Original Song on Sunday, it won’t be the first “A Star Is Born” tune to cop the prize: “Evergreen,” the No. 1 single from the third version of the movie, starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, sailed above the competition in 1977.
Songwriters Hall of Famer Paul Williams, who penned “Evergreen” with Streisand, says that the magic is in the “emotional peaks” of the story. “The story is so amazing,” says the 78-year-old, who co-wrote five other songs for 1976’s “A Star Is Born” soundtrack. “The story offers up a platform for the composers and lyricists to work on. Those are wonderful emotional highs to write about.”
Williams says that he immediately knew that “Shallow” — the hit duet sung by Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga (who also cowrote it) — was Oscar bait. “I predicted it,” he says. “When I heard the song, I thought, ‘You know what . . . that’s got a good shot at being nominated.’ I just loved it as that tender kind of gritty ballad.”
While he was familiar with the song, Williams hadn’t seen the film itself until earlier this month at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. “I’d been meaning to get to the theater to see it,” he says. “I watched it and just sat in the hotel room blubbering. From the very beginning, I became totally emotionally involved with it.”
Williams says that, as a recovering alcoholic who’s been sober 28 years, he related to Cooper’s character, Jackson Maine: “I watched him just shooting himself in the foot again and again when he drinks.”
As for his memories of winning his only Oscar out of six nominations, Williams says, “The thing that I remember most about standing on the stage accepting it with Barbra was, you look out at the audience . . . and there’s Kirk Douglas, there’s Gregory Peck, there’s Elizabeth Taylor. You go, ‘Oh my God!’ ”
The diminutive Williams also threw in a classic quip: “What I said was, ‘I was gonna thank all the little people, then I remembered, I am the little people.’ ”
And Williams — who has been president of the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers since 2009 — hasn’t given up on winning another Oscar. “We ain’t dead yet!” he says. “I’m working on it. I’m still writing and loving my life.”
