US Edition Randy Newman, whose acceptance speech was described by CBS as the "funniest of the Oscars", was asked by a young college reporter backstage after the ceremony if he had any advice for budding songwriters looking to break into the business. "Who would want to break into it?" he joked. "It's like a bank that's already been robbed."
Newman, a true great of modern satirical songwriting, had earlier revealed that he tried to persuade Oscar bosses to get Lady Gaga to duet on his award-winning song We Belong Together for the 2011 ceremony.
Newman's song, which he composed and sang for Toy Story 3, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song. The 67-year-old said: "I suggested that I should do my song with someone really inappropriate. My first idea was me and Lady Gaga. I could see us together, with her in a big way, and me in not such a big way. I think it would get some attention. But the academy never goes for any of my trashy ideas."
It was his 20th Oscar nomination and second win and he quipped in his speech: "My percentages aren't great."
Newman last won the Academy Award for the song I Didn't Have You from Monsters Inc. but he has some way to go to match his uncle, Alfred Newman, the dean of Hollywood composers. He was nominated 54 times, winning nine Oscars, including for The King And I in 1956.
Randy Newman used to watch the Oscar telecast on television as a child, seeing his uncles Alfred and Lionel conducting the live orchestra. He recalled: "Lionel did it once when Jerry Lewis was hosting and the show ran short, if you can imagine that. So Jerry, looking for things to do, yelled at him in his Jerry Lewis voice, 'Liiiiionelllll! Liiiionelllll!' And Lionel yelled back, 'Jeeeeerrry! Jeeeerrry!' "
Newman has talked amusingly of what it is like to attend the Oscars. He said: "The whole experience is so strange that I guess it's fun. I don't get nervous too often when I perform, but I do at the Oscars. If you make a mistake, everyone knows it. I did the show once with Lyle Lovett and I guess I was trying to help him relax, so I told him, 'Don't worry, it's like a fourth-rate vaudeville show.' And then I screwed up and came in too early on You've Got a Friend. So I wasn't much help.
"You see celebrities go by. There'll be some interest in me and then a movie star will come by, and, you know the Beatles' song I'm Looking Through You? That's the real feeling you get. It's so like being on another planet. It's such a weird event. I've always enjoyed it for the weirdness of it."
On 10 May, Newman releases the second volume of The Randy Newman Songbook, which will feature new, piano-and-voice-only versions of some of his classic songs. The album has been co-produced by Mitchell Froom and Lenny Waronker and includes songs spanning from the 1968 album Randy Newman (Cowboys) through his most recent, 2008′s Harps and Angels (Laugh and Be Happy and Losing You).
When he won an Oscar in 2002 for If I Didn't Have You he said; "The orchestra stood up and applauded, which they're not supposed to do, so it really got to me. Growing up the way I did, in a family of composers, all I ever wanted was to be respected by the studio musicians and the orchestra. They're the people whose opinion matters. I was worried that I was going to cry, so I was going, "Please, you can't do that. You'll be like Sally Field. It'll never go away. So I blinked a lot."
"I’m very grateful for this and surprised. My percentages aren’t great. I’ve been nominated 20 times and this is the 2nd time I won. At the Academy, at the lunch they have for the nominees, where they have like a Randy Newman chicken by this time, the, Mr. Mischer said that it’s not really good television to take a list out of your pocket and thank a lot of people. It’s not my style anyway, but it is in this case. I mean to have worked for Pixar doing the six pictures I’ve done, this one Lee Unkrich and worked with Mitchell Froom, Chris Montan at Disney.
I just have to thank these people. I don’t want to, I want to be good television so badly, as you can see. I’ve been on this show any number of times and I’ve slowed it down almost every time. No wonder they only nominate 4 songs, what about cinematography. So there’s 5. They could find a fifth song from someone. But hell with it. Think it might have beat me. Anyway, I thank you all very much for this. The Academy has been enormously kind to me as has the Music Branch and I love you all. Thank you very much."
