'Once' Stars Take Home Oscar Gold

While Spin certainly didn’t love the last record by the Frames, Glen Hansard’s long-time band of Irish rockers, his 2007 film, Once, found a soft spot in my heart on a recent cross-continental flight. Maybe it was the altitude — I once bawled watching In Her Shoes on a flight back from the U.K., for no apparent reason — but I found myself welling up as characters played by Hansard and Marketa Irglova find salvation in the recording studio during an otherwise bleak period in both their lives.

And though I preferred another song from the film, “When Your Mind’s Made Up,” to “Falling Slowly,” their Oscar-nominated track, and though I was quite disappointed that Eddie Vedder’s stirring recordings from Into the Wild were shunned in the Academy’s nominations, I was generally chuffed to see the duo wipe the floor with Disney’s Enchanted, particularly after our Oscar party’s female contingent erupted in drool-laden cooing when Enchanted‘s Patrick “McDreamy” Dempsey appeared as a presenter.

The Once duo’s performance — featuring a cameo from Hansard’s busted up guitar, a star of the film all by itself — could have been memorable enough, but it was their truncated acceptance speech that will endure in the pantheon of Oscar night memories. As Irglova stepped to the mic, the “sorry, you’re finished” music played and the microphone retracted rudely into the floor before she could utter a single word. After a commercial break, Oscar host Jon Stewart brought the singer back onstage, giving her a chance to “have her moment.” Cue the cooing.

Now Watch This:
Hansard and Irglova’s acceptance speeches https://www.youtube.com/embed/pe5ybN3eh-A