Look out, Lin-Manuel Miranda — Beyoncé has entered the chat.
The 40-year-old singer, already the female artist with the most Grammy wins, picked up her first Oscar nomination on Tuesday for best original song for “Be Alive,” a pulsing power ballad that she wrote with the songwriter Dixson for “King Richard,” a biopic about the father of Venus and Serena Williams.
The song, which plays during the film’s end credits and is accompanied by archival footage of the real Williams family, features inspirational lyrics that recount the journey the Williams sisters have taken to the top of the tennis world.
Backed by a drum-heavy beat and layered vocal harmonies, Beyoncé, in soaring voice, intones:
Look how we’ve been fighting to stay alive
So when we win we will have pride
Do you know how much we have cried?
How hard we had to fight?
Other lyrics speak to the importance of Black pride, family and sisterhood, with a chorus that underscores the importance of having the singer’s “family,” “sisters” and “tribe” by her side.
The song, with its blunt, steady beat and vocal pyrotechnics, “insists on the community effort behind the triumph,” The New York Times’s chief pop music critic Jon Pareles wrote. Clayton Davis of Variety compared “Be Alive” to the Common and John Legend song “Glory,” which concluded Ava DuVernay’s 2014 historical drama “Selma.” That song took the Oscar
