{"id":577052,"date":"2023-06-02T21:00:00","date_gmt":"2023-06-02T18:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/en.buradabiliyorum.com\/hollywood-flashback-buffy-sainte-marie-was-oscars-first-indigenous-winner\/"},"modified":"2023-06-02T21:00:00","modified_gmt":"2023-06-02T18:00:00","slug":"hollywood-flashback-buffy-sainte-marie-was-oscars-first-indigenous-winner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/buradabiliyorum.com\/en\/hollywood-flashback-buffy-sainte-marie-was-oscars-first-indigenous-winner\/","title":{"rendered":"#Hollywood Flashback: Buffy Sainte-Marie Was Oscar\u2019s First Indigenous Winner"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\n \u201cUp Where We Belong,\u201d from An Officer and a Gentleman<\/em>, may now be a wedding standard, but back in early 1982 it was just a gorgeous tune floating through the mind of Canadian-American singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie. <\/p>\n

\n \u201cI wrote the melody at my piano, just playing music by myself for fun,\u201d Sainte-Marie, 82, tells THR<\/em>. \u201cIt just popped into my head like songs do.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n When composer Jack Nitzsche reached out to her to collaborate on the Officer<\/em> score, she played him \u201cmy melody and hook and the bridge, but there were no words yet.\u201d Director Taylor Hackford then enlisted lyricist Will Jennings, who watched a rough cut of the film. By the final scene \u2014 when Richard Gere\u2019s naval officer scoops up Debra Winger\u2019s factory worker \u2014 he\u2019d formulated a ballad about love soaring to where \u201ceagles cry on a mountain high.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n It was Hackford\u2019s friend Gary George, former PR chief of Warner Bros. Records, who suggested his client Jennifer Warnes to sing it; and it was Warnes who came up with the idea to make it a duet with Joe Cocker. \u201cJack and I weren\u2019t invited to the recording session, but whatever they did in there was magic,\u201d says Sainte-Marie, who notes that producer \u201cStewart Levine\u2019s perfect arrangement became a towering but totally natural duet.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n Paramount heads Michael Eisner and Don Simpson \u201chated the record and said it would never be a hit,\u201d Hackford once said. But it spent 23 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, including three at No. 1. It also won a best original song Oscar in 1983, making Sainte-Marie the first Indigenous artist to win one. (She is Piapot Cree Nation.) <\/p>\n

\n \u201cIt\u2019s pretty surreal to walk around Hollywood on Oscar night holding your own Academy Award while eating pizza,\u201d she recalls. \u201cIt\u2019s only been recently that anyone has mentioned that I was the first Indigenous Oscar winner. It took another 38 years for Taika Waititi \u00ad\u00ad\u2014 Maori from New Zealand \u2014 to win for Jojo Rabbit<\/em>. And recently Wes Studi, who is Cherokee, received an honorary Oscar for his great body of work. Although Taika, Wes and I are each from unique and distant life experiences, all three of us are active supporters of other Indigenous artists who are telling our stories in film.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\"THR<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

\n This story first app<\/a>eared in the May 31 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n