Billie Eilish Says She ‘Bombed’ Her 2020 Oscars Performance, Calling It ‘Trash’

Billie Eilish is her own worst critic.

The five-time Grammy winner was praised by music outlets and fans alike for her take on the 1965 Beatles classic, “Yesterday,” at the 2020 Academy Awards earlier this month. Her own assessment, however, is less than glowing. 

Eilish told Apple Music’s Zane Lowe in an interview last week that she was sick during the Oscars, meaning that her version of “Yesterday” ― performed during the Feb. 9 ceremony’s In Memoriam segment ― wasn’t to her satisfaction. 

“I bombed that performance,” she said. “That was trash.”

After Lowe begged to differ, Eilish clarified that she’d felt more at home taking the stage at the 2020 Grammy Awards last month given that show’s emphasis on music as opposed to film. 

“The Oscars is not my people,” she said. “I’m not used to that. At least the Grammys wasn’t as scary because it was artists. It felt like my people.”

“I knew a lot of them already and I’d met them and they knew of me,” she continued. “But the Oscars … I’m like, ‘These are movie stars.’”

The 18-year-old could be about to get her first taste of Hollywood stardom, however. Last week, she released “No Time to Die,” her theme song for the forthcoming James Bond film of the same name. 

The track positions Eilish alongside Shirley Bassey, Paul McCartney and Madonna, who have provided tunes for the 007 franchise over the years. She’s also the youngest artist ever to do so. 

In her interview with Lowe, Eilish hinted that she and brother Finneas ― also her frequent co-writer and producer ― had a premonition they’d one day record a Bond theme. 

“Two years ago we were like, ‘Wouldn’t it be crazy to make a song for the Bond movies? Wouldn’t that be dope?’” she recalled. 

Details on “No Time to Die,” starring Daniel Craig in his final stint as Bond, have been kept under tight lockdown ahead of the film’s March 31 world premiere. To record the song, Eilish said she and Finneas were given just a fragment of the screenplay to influence their songwriting. 

“We got a piece of the script, like the first scene, and then we wrote the song immediately,” she said. “We wrote it in three days and we wrote it in Texas and we recorded it in a bunk on the bus in a basement in the dark.”