Warren, who recounted this story during a video interview from her office in Hollywood, knew the feeling all too well. She told Farrell, “Well, I got kicked out of two junior highs and barely graduated high school. But we are definitely in the coolest f—ing class photo in the world.”
Warren, 66, wasn’t a teenage delinquent so much as she found school rather pointless because she already knew exactly what she wanted to do: be a songwriter. Raised in the San Fernando Valley with parents and older sisters who constantly blasted records and the radio, music seeped into her brain early on. She admired the singers, but what really caught her attention were the writing credits, the people who composed the music and crafted the words that somehow perfectly captured a feeling you didn’t even know you had.
So Warren started writing songs and never stopped. This is not an exaggeration. She still writes every single day, a practice as natural and necessary to her as breathing. “This is my life,” she said. “I have to do it.” While she might not feel that far removed from the student who ignored classes in favor of teaching herself piano and practicing guitar chords and scribbling down lyrics, Warren’s laser focus paid off in ways that she still can’t even wrap her mind around.
She has written some of modern music’s most popular ballads that have soundtracked big-budget movies and become staples of karaoke nights worldwide: the Oscar-nominated “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” by Aerosmith, Celine Dion’s “Because You Loved Me,” Trisha Yearwood and LeAnn Rimes’s “How Do I Live.” Plus she’s penned smash hits including Toni Braxton’s “Un-Break My Heart” and Cher’s “If I Could Turn Back Time,” in addition to hundreds of others for artists from Whitney Houston to Beyoncé to Lady Gaga.
Her astonishingly lengthy number of accomplishments includes 32 Top-10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, nine of which hit No. 1; she’s tied with Lionel Richie for solo-writing the most No. 1 songs in Billboard history.
But the statistic that pops up most often is her Oscars streak: Warren has been nominated 14 times for best original song and never won. Her first nod was for Starship’s “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” from the 1987 comedy “Mannequin” and she’s been nominated at least once a decade ever since, including the past six consecutive years.
She will learn the results of her 14th nomination at the 95th annual Academy Awards on March 12, where her song “Applause” (from the anthology film “Tell It Like a Woman” and performed by Sofia Carson) will compete against Lady Gaga’s “Hold My Hand” from “Top Gun: Maverick”; Rihanna’s “Lift Me Up” from “Black Panther: Wakanda Forever”; David Byrne and Mitski’s “This Is a Life” from “Everything Everywhere All at Once”; and Rahul Sipligunj and Kaala Bhairava’s “Naatu Naatu” from “RRR.” Warren and Carson will also perform the tune together during the telecast.
At this point, even Warren occasionally treats her streak as comic relief: “I’ve waited 34 years to say this: I’d like to thank the Academy!” she told the audience during an emotional speech at the Governors Awards in November, where she accepted an honorary Oscar (a prize that she calls “the big Oscar”), the first time the statuette has gone to a songwriter since the award was created in the late-1920s. “I’ve had a lot of speeches that got crumpled up in my pocket.”
She was deeply moved by the honor. She said that she later heard people in the audience were crying during her speech, which quickly made its way around the internet. Countless attendees came up to her and said, “Finally.”
Because despite her success, Warren is still human: Of course she’s disappointed that she hasn’t won for best original song. A couple instances still sting, including “Til It Happens to You,” the haunting ballad performed by Lady Gaga for the documentary “The Hunting Ground,” about sexual assault on college campuses. The song won an Emmy award and Lady Gaga sang it at the 2016 Oscars alongside sexual assault survivors onstage. After that powerful moment, it only seemed natural the song — the front-runner, according to prognosticators — would win.
“And then it was ‘The winner is … ‘Oh s—, not me,’” Warren said; the trophy went to Sam Smith’s song from the James Bond movie “Spectre.” But Warren still hears from people who said “Til It Happens to You” helped save their lives. “I remember being bummed at the time … but that song really went on to be a pretty important cultural piece of music.”
“If I had to choose between winning an Oscar for one of these songs and maybe being nominated one time, I’m taking 14 times and not winning,” she added. “And if I never win, I’d rather keep getting nominated. I love it. I love the whole process. I love everything about it.”
Warren is not one of those people who pretends that she learned about her Oscar nomination because her agent called and woke her up. She gets so nervous the night before nominations that she just doesn’t sleep — this year, she hosted a “sleepless sleepover” party with a feast of pizza and pasta and salad. Her “sane friends” left at midnight, she said, but the “real crazy people” stayed until the nominations were announced around 5:20 a.m. Pacific time, at which point Warren was counting the minutes and nervously pacing her house eating pizza.
Carson, the 29-year-old singer-actress-Disney star whom Warren calls “a badass and a great singer,” was in attendance, and as soon as “Applause” was announced, she started crying. Warren was equally over the moon, even on nomination No. 14.
“Being nominated is winning. I haven’t won yet, I’m probably not going to win this year,” she said. “But I won because I was nominated. ”
Warren was especially pleased that “Applause” was recognized because “Tell It Like a Woman” had a fraction of the reach that its fellow nominated films did; Warren thinks it might be the least-viewed of any movie in which one of her songs has appeared. The movie features seven female-centric short films, all directed by women, featuring stars such as Jennifer Hudson, Eva Longoria, Marcia Gay Harden and Cara Delevingne. “Applause” appears in a segment starring Anjali Lama, Nepal’s first transgender model, and again at the end credits.
“The people that did see the movie and heard the song, it resonated with them,” Warren said, noting the song has already won prizes from the Society of Composers & Lyricists and Hollywood Music in Media Awards. Italian film producer Chiara Tilesi originally approached her about the project, and although Warren is bombarded with requests to write songs for movies — the name “Diane Warren” on a soundtrack is a real attention-grabber — the “women helping women” theme immediately stuck with her.
“I have to feel like it’s something I can do and I can put my heart and soul in, you know?” Warren said. “I know some people think if it’s not a big movie, I won’t be interested. But if it’s something I love I’m going to do it. I don’t do something for the money, I do something because I emotionally connect.”
“Applause” encourages listeners to celebrate their self-worth, a message that Warren struggles with herself. “I feel like I haven’t even had my first big hit yet,” she said, with a straight face — she knows she’s had more success than most people could dream about, but she still wants to push herself. “I’m still super hungry and just motivated to get better at what I do and to write more songs.”
So off she goes, every day to her studio, where she works best in the quiet. She gets inspiration everywhere from reading to eavesdropping on conversations, and struggles to define what her “process” is; sometimes songs just click into place. For the tracks that result in Oscar nominations, she will always be ecstatic no matter what the result.
“It doesn’t get any less exciting. I mean, it’s so thrilling. It’s so amazing because they only choose five songs,” she said. “It’s not easy to get nominated for an Academy Award — ask all the people that haven’t.”