The Lonely Island performing at the 2015 Oscars; Photo: John Shearer/Shutterstock
In an oddly stocked Best Original Song class on the 90th edition of the Oscars last night (Sunday, March 4) that could have gone to all Mary J. Blige, Sufjan Stevens, Common, the whole lot, with Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez bringing home the statue with their contribution to Coco, still, the Oscars is as Oscars does both in front of and behind the curtain.
It was bad enough that the American public had to listen to milk-dud Jimmy Kimmel try a hand at Hollywood approval, but now it has been revealed that the merry song pranksters that make up the SNL-spawned Lonely Island comedy music crew were deprived of a follow-up to their sensory overload 2015 appearance due to the Academy’s stance that their idea was ‘financially and logistically impossible,’ according to a video of a demo the group posted on their YouTube channel today.
Front-loaded with a little synopsis of what went wrong, the Lonely Island crew divulge, “We were asked to write a song for this year’s Oscars… Unfortunately it wasn’t chosen because it was ‘financially and logistically impossible,’ so for fun we thought we’d share the rough storyboards of what would have been a fully shot, star-studded music video of exorbitant cost.”
What unfolds is a pretty spectacular song and dance about all the rejects of this year’s nominees called “Why Not Me,” which, c’mon, everyone loves and underdog. Especially with a jealous confessional from Aquaman like so: “In ‘The Shape of Water‘ I heard that a lady boned a fishman/But if you’re gonna bone a fishman/Why not bone a fish like this man?”
Listen to the full demo below, and wonder what could’ve been: