Countdown to the Oscars: Best Original Score

We’re counting down the days until the Academy Awards! We’ll be here, breaking down each of the 23 categories, talking a bit of history, and trying to figure out who is going to win all those gold statues. So check back throughout the next three weeks for Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars.

Best Original Score

The nominees are:

All Quiet on the Western Front

Babylon

The Banshees of Inisherin

Everything Everywhere All at Once

The Fabelmans

I said this last year, but it is exciting to watch the Music Branch of the Academy expand its thinking on the Original Score category. Gone are the days of cut and paste strings and horns blaring over everything, telegraphing every action or emotion. And, good riddance. What we have instead are much more nuanced, interesting, and experimental works that nonetheless complement their films wonderfully.

This year, we have a brilliant jazz composer, two electronica artists known for their experimentation and highly successful in the world of pop music, and none other than the best composer in film today. The Academy still found space to nominate, for the 53rd time, one of its legends who is mostly playing the hits at this point, but with the variety of the other nominees, who can find time to complain?

Babylon – I put on the Babylon Original Score this morning just to listen to it, and I have had “Voodoo Mama,” probably its most recognizable track, stuck in my head ever since. If you have seen the trailer, you know the track. If you have seen the movie, then you know how well it is deployed. Babylon is an epic work of mad genius by director Damien Chazelle, and the same could be said of the score, written by Chazelle’s Harvard roommate, Justin Hurwitz.

Hurtwitz is one of the best young composers on the scene, and it is almost unfathomable to think of the work we have yet to hear from him. So far, he has only worked on Chazelle’s films, writing all those supposed jazz standards at the heart of Whiplash, winning Oscars for Score and Song for La La Land, and composing the doomy, atmospheric tones of First Man. It feels like the sky’s the limit for Hurwitz and we’re all just along for the ride.

All Quiet on the Western Front – Three tones. That’s all it takes for composer Volker Bertelmann, credited under the stage name Hauschka, to evoke endless reservoirs of dread. The first time it kicks in on the soundtrack, you wonder if something has gone terribly wrong with the film. This is not the kind of score we have grown accustomed to for prestige war pictures. This is darker, more aggressive, impossibly angry. It is the sound of the machinery of conflict dispatching one victim after another. It is, frankly, terrifying.

Hauschka, who has had a long successful career as an experimental electronic musician, has taken to feature composing without missing a beat. He often works with noted American composer Dustin O’Halloran, and together, they were nominated for this award in 2016 for Lion. This time around, Hauschka is going at it alone, and the results are some of the most spectacular work of the year.

Everything Everywhere All at Once – From one successful experimental musician to a trio, Son Lux is the electronica group credited with composing the score for the Daniels’ sci-fi mish mash. As the film moves from melodrama to kung-fu to multiverse action-comedy, the score matches it beat for beat, tone for tone. It is a fascinating work, pulling from a vast array of genres and incorporating a wide assortment of instruments to arrive at the eclectic, if schizophrenic, place it lands. If nothing else, this nomination is evidence of how far the Music Branch has come from the traditional strings and horns arrangements of old.

The Fabelmans – Speaking of which, we come to the second-most nominated person in the history of the Academy Awards. Second behind no less a luminary than Walt Disney himself, we have longtime Steven Spielberg collaborator and all-around legend John Williams. This is his 53rd Academy Award nomination, and not to say Williams isn’t one of the best ever to do it – he is – but at this point, he is getting nominations just to show up to work.

His score for The Fabelmans is fine, but I promise you it is breaking no new ground. It is, perhaps, one of the master’s most restrained scores, leaning on a set of tinkling piano refrains, but it’s nothing we haven’t heard before. The Music Branch likes to find its people and just nominate them over and over – we’re going to talk about this problem next time when we discuss Original Song. Since 2010, Williams has worked on 12 films, and he has received eight nominations. He’s a legend, but it’s time to open the doors for a new generation.

The Banshees of Inisherin – I won’t pretend to be impartial here, and I’ve said it before on the site: Carter Burwell is the best composer working in film today. That has been the case going back at least to his work on Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges in 2008 and the Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man in 2009. Honestly, he probably put his stamp on the film composition world with his brilliant work on the Coens’ Fargo back in 1996. It has simply been decade after decade of accomplishment.

Every score of his is instantly recognizable as a Burwell work – in the way of early Williams or Thomas Newman – but they are all distinct and specific to their films. Here, he avoids the traditional Irish instrumentation one might expect in favor of something more haunting and universal. It’s a masterclass in underplaying the emotion. Burwell isn’t telling us how to feel, rather he is helping make us feel something. Unbelievably, this is just Burwell’s third nomination, following Carol and Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri. If there is justice in the Oscars world, he will win this award someday.

The final analysis

Hurwitz’s Babylon score is the showiest work of the bunch and has certainly picked up its fair share of accolades throughout the Oscars season. It is the one of this bunch that most screams for attention – in a good way, in a way that makes sense within the narrative in which it appears. The only thing that could potentially prevent a win here is that voters just like the other movies better overall. 

Babylon is the only film in this category not nominated for Best Picture, but it’s unclear how much that matters. Since 2000, just three films have won Best Original Score without a corresponding Best Picture nomination – Soul, The Hateful Eight, and Frida – but Soul was a popular movie about music and The Hateful Eight was a (well deserved) career award for Ennio Morricone. That said, as a previous winner, Hurwitz is in the club, and the power of his work will likely be enough to carry the day.

Will win: Babylon

Should win: All Quiet on the Western Front

Should have been here: TÁR

A note about my favorite snub: Hildur Guðnadóttir’s work on TÁR is without parallel this year. It is the perfect brooding accompaniment to everything director Todd Field is trying to accomplish. The Music Branch likely felt the score relied too much on the classic composers with whom the central character is obsessed (Mahler, first and foremost), but there is no mistaking the tremendous work Guðnadóttir puts into every second of music she composes for this film.

Next time: Original Song

Last Cinema Standing’s 2017 Year in Review

The tendency in people is to look for a lesson, a theme, some kind of connecting thread to give all the chaos around us meaning and purpose. We invent religions and other systems of belief to cope. We study far-off stars and earth-bound microbes in search of answers. We talk, hopefully, with each other – as opposed to at each other, over each other, or not at all – creating communities to guide us, comfort us, and protect us. There must be some reason, we think, we wonder, we hope, and in the face of great uncertainty, we press on.

All of this is to say 2017 did not make much sense. At times, navigating the past 12 months felt like creeping through a dimly lit corridor, grasping at shadows instead of the light. I won’t get too political here – there will be plenty of time for that later – except to say it was a bad year and logic suggests this will be even worse.

Last Cinema Standing began as a way to start a conversation about films, to relate them to people’s lives, and to foster a deeper appreciation for what the movies can teach us about ourselves and each other. In the face of the world as it is, it is fair to ask if that mission still has meaning. I submit it means more now than ever before. I am fond of quoting Roger Ebert and in particular his calling the cinema “a machine that generates empathy.” In this new world, I cannot think of a greater need than such a machine.

So we press on. Where life does not provide a lesson, a theme, or a thread, perhaps the year in film will offer one. Beyond that, however, the Year in Review gives us a chance to reflect on and celebrate a bounty of wonderful movies and experiences. It is about the moments, the quotes, the performances, and the films that will stick with us as the calendar pages flip. Last Cinema Standing will spend the next week diving into all of that and more, but first, I wanted to share a few highlights from a year in moviegoing.

Writer-director Julia Ducournau’s Raw screened as part of the Film Society’s New Directors, New Films Festival, and it was a treat, indeed. Ducournau and star Garance Marillier stayed for a fabulous question-and-answer session afterward, during which a woman in the audience stood and angrily confronted the director. She wondered why such a film even needs to exist then stormed out of the theater. Ducournau merely smirked and continued undeterred. There must be a perverse pleasure in making a film that upsets someone to such a degree but nevertheless compels her to sit through the whole thing.

In April, the QUAD Cinema, one of those great old New York City art-house theaters, after a years-long renovation and change of hands, re-opened as a cinephile’s dream. Apart from its wonderful selection of first-run films, the operators have dedicated the QUAD to becoming the premier repertory theater in the city. As part of that mission, the programmers present the First Encounters series, in which notable figures in the film world choose films they have never seen, watch them with an audience and react.

I was fortunate to attend the inaugural event, at which writer-director-actor Greta Gerwig presented David Lynch’s Blue Velvet. A few days later, John Turturro was on hand for a viewing of Satyajit Ray’s world cinema masterwork Pather Panchali. To see a great or interesting film anew through the eyes of one who has never seen it is among the true joys of cinema – this is why we share our favorite movies with our friends – and to experience that with professionals who are also endlessly knowledgeable and boundless in the depth of their love for the form, well, that is just the icing on the cake.

In September, the Lincoln Center screened Spike Lee’s Crooklyn as the inaugural One Film, One New York selection, an initiative to unite the city under the banner of a single moviegoing experience. The film was shown for free around the city, and Lee appeared at the Lincoln Center in Manhattan and the BAM Cinematek in Brooklyn with New York Times film critic AO Scott to discuss his quintessentially New York film. My fiancée and I waited three hours in the rain to hear Mr. Lee’s thoughts, and he did not disappoint. Spike, as ever, was Spike – equal parts prickly, confrontational, and humble, but always damn right.

The following month came the New York Film Festival, where we attended a screening of Sean Baker’s lovely ode to the resilience and spirit of childhood, The Florida Project. Baker was joined onstage afterward by his co-writer and the stars of the film, including the 7-year-old scene-stealer Brooklynn Prince, who if she so chooses could feature in everything from now until the sun burns out and that would be just fine.

Eight years ago, I called Carter Burwell the best composer working in Hollywood, an opinion that has not wavered. Last month, I got the chance to tell him so when he was on hand for a screening of Todd Haynes’ Wonderstruck. Long stretches of the film are carried only by music, and Burwell once again proves up to the task. In discussion, he proved worthy of admiration not only for his talent but for his kindness and generosity,

I could go on all day like this, and if you catch me in conversation, there is always the chance I will, but let’s wrap it up with this: In May, I attended the Film Society’s Chaplin Award Gala, where Robert De Niro was honored for his contributions to the cinema. It was about this time the current administration was elbow-deep in its attempts to defund the National Endowment for the Arts, among other arts programs.

It was a wonderful evening, filled with humorous, heartfelt speeches from folks like Meryl Streep, Ben Stiller, Michael Douglas, Whoopi Goldberg, and Martin Scorsese, who ultimately presented De Niro with the award. But the highlight surely was De Niro, who could not pass up the opportunity to stand up and speak for artists and art everywhere in a speech that spoke to the very core of why we were all there that night.

“Everyone knows Chaplin was a great artist, but he made his movies to entertain. It was only later that they became art,” De Niro said. “I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately because of our government’s hostility towards art. The budget proposal, among its other draconian cuts to life-saving and life-enhancing programs, eliminates the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. For their own devices and political purposes, the administration suggests that the money for these all-inclusive program goes to the rich, liberal elite. This is what they now call an alternative fact. I call it what it is — bullshit.”

Bullshit it was, and bullshit it remains. If there is a lesson, a theme, or a meaning to be taken from the chaos of the past year, it is this: Art will not be silenced, and each of the extraordinary writers, directors, and performers contributing to the cinema is evidence of that fact. So we press on.

Welcome to Last Cinema Standing’s 2017 Year in Review, in which we will look back at the year that was cinema through the best moments, best quotes, best performances, and best films of the past 12 months. Check back each day this week for a new entry. Tomorrow: Top 10 Moments.

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Original Score

Ennio Morricone's score for The Hateful Eight is the frontrunner at the Academy Awards for Best Original Score.

Welcome to Last Cinema Standing’s Countdown to the Oscars, our daily look at this year’s Academy Awards race. Be sure to check back every day this month for analysis of each of the Academy’s 24 categories.

Best Original Score

The nominees are:

Bridge of Spies

Carol

The Hateful Eight

Sicario

Star Wars: The Force Awakens

So, I spent a lot of words yesterday tearing down the music branch for its uninspired nominations for Best Original Song. Last year, I used this space to gripe about the exclusion of the year’s best score due to the branch’s seemingly arbitrary rules. The entire system for determining eligibility and nominees in both music categories needs an overhaul.

However, even a blind squirrel finds a nut once in a while, and though these may not be the five nominees I would have chosen, the music nominated for Best Original Score this year is fantastic across the board. A few of the best composers working today are nominated alongside two of the best film composers of all time, and their work covers a broad spectrum from big and bombastic adventure music to subtle and subdued drama.

Unusually for this category, only one nominated film is also nominated for Best Picture. The last time that happened was in 2003 with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, which went on to win the award. In fact, a Best Picture nominee has won this award every year since 2003, though interestingly only three Best Picture winners in that 12-year span have also won Best Original Score. Either way, the run of Best Picture dominance in this category seems set to end this year as the Academy may finally be ready to reward one of the giants of the craft.

The Hateful Eight – Ennio Morricone is among the most famous composers in the world, and his compositions have been repurposed in countless ways across a wide variety of mediums. The main title theme to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly might be one of the two or three most recognizable pieces of film score ever written. He has been nominated for six Oscars and received an honorary Academy Award in 2007 for his contributions to cinema.

Morricone had consciously avoided scoring westerns recently to avoid being thought of as only a western composer, and it took Quentin Tarantino to convince the Italian master to return to the genre that launched his career. The funny thing is – and Tarantino has acknowledged this in numerous interviews – Morricone pretty much avoided writing a western score. The music in The Hateful Eight sounds like it belongs in a horror movie more than a talky western.

Every element of the score oozes dread. From the sinister pounding of the drums to the whining and pulsing strings layered over it to the low-register lead, Morricone has perfectly tapped into the drawing-room mystery aspects of Tarantino’s script while bringing an unhinged energy that ultimately makes the music the best part of the film. The Hateful Eight is well liked enough by Academy members, and the season appears headed in the direction of awarding Morricone his first competitive Oscar. It would be a well-deserved and fitting honor.

Star Wars: The Force Awakens – The man who could stand in Morricone’s way, though, has been here before – more times than almost anybody. John Williams’ 50 Academy Award nominations are second only to Walt Disney for most nominations for an individual. His compositions for Jaws, Star Wars, and Raiders of the Lost Ark are part of the cultural heritage, and the American Film Institute named the theme to Star Wars the greatest score of all time. It does not get much more iconic than that.

If Morricone returning to the western genre is exciting, then Williams returning to the Star Wars universe is on another level. The 84-year-old Williams has reduced his work load significantly in recent years, but there is only one man for the job of composing a Star Wars soundtrack. His music for Star Wars: The Force Awakens is everything we have come to expect from Williams – big horns, driving strings, and dynamic tension between the quiet and the loud that signals adventure and mystery.

Williams has been nominated 19 times since his last win for Schindler’s List in 1993. Not among those 19 nominations are any of the Star Wars prequels, though he was nominated for each film in the original trilogy and won for A New Hope. Williams is a legend, and every single member of the Academy knows it, and it is possible that respect will carry him to a sixth Oscar.

Bridge of Spies – While Williams went off to compose the score for Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Thomas Newman stepped in to fill the musical void for director Steven Spielberg on the Cold War thriller Bridge of Spies. This is the first Spielberg film in 30 years not conducted by Williams, but Newman does an admirable job of getting on Spielberg’s wavelength and finding the right tones for an old-school story of heroism in the face of insurmountable odds.

The horns and military-style drums immediately stand out, and some of the main themes feel like a throwback to some of James Horner’s early 1990s compositions for films such as Patriot Games, Clear and Present Danger, and Apollo 13. Newman has been nominated 12 times for Best Original Score and once for Best Original Song, but he has never won.

Newman’s compositions throughout his career have tended to be more idiosyncratic than the Academy usually likes, and his more classical work on Bridge of Spies could be right up members’ alley. That, coupled with the Best Picture nomination for the film, would make him a threat for the win in most years, but with Williams and Morricone in the picture, Newman will likely be relegated to bridesmaid status once again.

Carol – A little more than six years ago on this site, I called Carter Burwell the best composer working in Hollywood. That feels even truer today than it did then. He is my personal favorite music composer of any kind, film or not. His scores for Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, In Bruges, A Serious Man, and Where the Wild Things Are rank among my favorite albums of all time. He is best known probably for his work with the Coen Brothers – or perhaps among certain people for his Twilight scores – but his recent collaborations with director Todd Haynes on the Mildred Pierce miniseries and Carol have been equally fruitful.

For Carol, Burwell is working firmly within his favorite subgenre – off-kilter dramas about descent into darkness. The way his strings swirl around the listener while the piano holds the center together just spells gloom and madness, but it is never overbearing, which is key for a film as subtle and restrained as Carol. Burwell also introduces themes of romanticism into the score that he rarely uses but that perfectly complement the film’s thematic intent.

I am ecstatic that Burwell has received his first Oscar nomination. It is long overdue. He is unlikely to win and is probably running third or fourth in the category this year, but now that he is in the club, expect to see Burwell pop up as a perennial nominee. He will win one eventually, and when Burwell accepts his Oscar someday, that will be one of the happiest moments of my Oscar-watching life.

Sicario – Kudos to the music branch – how often do I say that? – for nominating something as strange and unsettling as Jóhann Jóhannsson’s work on Sicario. Jóhannsson earned his first Oscar nomination last year for his far more traditional score for The Theory of Everything. I had him pegged for the win last year as well, but he lost out to the overwhelming popularity of The Grand Budapest Hotel. This time, I would be shocked if Jóhannsson found himself onstage, not because the work is not deserving but because the Academy rarely goes for something this unusual in the category.

The driving percussion and punishing strings remind of Hans Zimmer’s iconic work on Inception but set in a world without hope. Amid the brutality and carnage of the U.S.-Mexico border wars, the music makes the characters’ sense of dread palpable for the audience. Deep feelings of disquiet creep into viewers minds thanks in large part to the way Jóhannsson’s score penetrates the narrative. You do not so much hear the music as feel it in your gut. That does not make it a good bet to win an Oscar, but it does make it a great score.

The final analysis

Morricone has the inside track here. Along with a Golden Globe win and general industry love, he is overdue for this honor, and voters know it. Williams could get in on sentiment, but much of the same sentiment that would drive him to a victory also holds true for Morricone. The other nominated scores are great and would be deserving winners, but a win for Morricone would be history-making, and that temptation might be too much to pass up for the Academy.

Will win: The Hateful Eight

Should win: The Hateful Eight

Should have been here: It Follows

Tomorrow: Best Sound Mixing