Countdown to the Oscars: Best Original Score

Dev Patel in Lion, which is nominated 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 leading up to the ceremony for analysis of each of the Academy’s 24 categories and more.

Best Original Score

The nominees are:

Jackie

La La Land

Lion

Moonlight

Passengers

For the previous two years, the music categories have been an airing of grievances of a sort for me, particularly Best Original Song, but this category has drawn my ire nearly as often. Outdated rules and a branch seemingly content in its insular, stodgy tastes contribute to the problem. Once again, wonderful scores were left out in the cold after they were deemed ineligible for one reason or another, including two-time nominee Jóhann Jóhannsson’s work on Arrival.

However, to the charge of insularity, the Academy’s music branch, for once, can plead innocent. Apart from a well-deserved nomination for one of the Academy’s favorite sons, these composers are all first-time nominees, making for an exciting and eclectic list. By nominating so many first-timers, many of whom are quite young, relative to the average age in the music branch, the Academy is signaling a way forward and offering a glimpse of its own future. Based on these nominees, that future looks bright, indeed.

Jackie – The Oscars often, sadly, are a boys’ club. One need only know no woman ever has been nominated for Best Cinematography to see that fact. The Academy has taken steps to address its racial diversity problem, which is admirable, but the lack of representation for women is equally pressing, particularly in the crafts branches, where the disparities are greatest. Mica Levi is the first woman nominated for Original Score since Rachel Portman in 2000. That’s 16 years since the last nomination for a woman here. I promise you the problem is not with the women and their work.

Levi’s work here, for instance, is the best of this group, the best of the year in fact. Hers is no token nomination – and the Academy doesn’t seem sufficiently concerned about representation in its craft categories to bestow a token nomination anyway. On just her second feature film score, Levi matches the intensity and ominous portent of director Pablo Larraín’s film with a strange, unsettling series of compositions that have no equal this year.

Jackie is a film about loss, grief, pain, and the discomfort of feeling all of those emotions in the public eye. Levi’s magnificent and magnificently weird string arrangements tell us all we need to know about Jacqueline Kennedy’s (Natalie Portman) headspace. She is adrift, caught at all times among competing emotions that twist and turn not in smooth curves but at right angles. Levi’s score is willing to go dark places and is not afraid to make the audience uncomfortable, and that is its greatest strength.

La La Land – Justin Hurwitz holds the distinction of being this year’s only triple nominee with his nomination here and a double nomination in the Best Original Song category. It is not unheard for someone to score three nominations in a single year from the music branch, but it does not happen every year, and it stands as a remarkable achievement.

Like Levi, Hurwitz is relatively new to the film scoring game with just three features to his credit, all for his former Harvard roommate and buddy writer-director Damien Chazelle. Their collaborations, which all revolve in one way or another around jazz and jazz musicians, have been incredibly fruitful, and their shared ride to Hollywood prominence truly is a feel-good story.

It almost is not fair to ask other films to compete in the same category as La La Land, which is wall-to-wall music. The instrumentations are straight from the jazz playbook, and similar to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, the movie has a poppy, rhythmic feel throughout thanks to its pulsing, endlessly listenable score. Even the smallest cues are given pep and verve by Hurwitz’s insistent, playful choices, all of which feel of a piece with the film’s jaunty, spritely tone. Hurwitz won a pair of Golden globes this year for song and score, and he should clear some space for the extra hardware he will pick up here.

Lion – It’s like a riddle with an easy and obvious answer: What happens when a pair of piano virtuosos come together to compose the music for a dark but uplifting saga of loss and discovery? Magic. Dustin O’Halloran and Volker Bertelmann, performing under the stage name Hauschka, compose a score for Lion that is gorgeous and intricate but never overwhelming.

Director Garth Davis’ film is too delicate for the kind of overtly orchestral score it would be easy to impose on it. Instead, O’Halloran and Bertelmann find the story’s soul in the dogged commitment of its main character, Saroo (Sunny Pawar and Dev Patel). The composers’ beautiful repeating piano patterns are a tribute to and reflection of the single-mindedness possessed by the film’s hero. The push and pull between the repetitions and variations eventually become the point as the score grows and expands to encompass a world that feels larger by the minute.

Both O’Halloran and Bertelmann are first-time nominees whose primary careers exist outside the world of film, though each has numerous film scores to his credit. They are musicians and performers first and foremost, but here is to hoping they continue to explore, either together or individually, the world of cinema and its possibilities, which are limitless for composers such as these.

Moonlight – Here is an interesting bit of trivia that may seem a little convoluted but bear with me. Nicholas Britell was a co-producer on Whiplash, La La Land director Chazelle’s previous Oscar-winning film. Now, he is the nominated composer for a film competing for the top award against Chazelle’s follow-up film. I cannot be 100 percent certain, but I doubt if this has ever happened. Britell and Chazelle’s Harvard connection clears things up for the most part, but man, sometimes Hollywood seems so small.

Moonlight, from writer-director Barry Jenkins, is an arresting film from its first frames. It grabs you and brings you into its world in a way few other films can or even attempt. For most viewers, it is a jarring experience, a direct challenge to our preconceived notions of lives we have never known. It is not, however, confrontational. Instead, it evokes curiosity and, through that curiosity, empathy. As we are drawn deeper into the minds of these characters, we become more immersed in who they are, and Britell’s music expertly guides us along this process.

Like the film itself, the score refuses to coddle the audience, never simply giving in to viewers’ ideas of what a film score should sound like. Its use of strings is haunting and deeply moving, particularly on standout composition “The Middle of the World,” which featured prominently in the film’s advertising. Each of the story’s versions of the main character – Little (Alex Hibbert), Chiron (Ashton Sanders), and Black (Trevante Rhodes) – has his own theme, helping create distinct characterizations within the narrative. However, everything feels part of a cohesive whole, and we are always aware we are watching the journey of one young man, discovering who he is and who he wants to be.

Passengers – Thomas Newman’s dad, Alfred Newman, is the most awarded composer in Academy history with nine Oscars from 45 nominations – 43 for Original Score and two for Best Original Song. Such a legacy would cast a shadow over anyone, but I bring it up only because the younger Newman does not operate in that shadow. He is his own bright, brilliant light, and his fellow composers have recognized as such to the tune of 13 Original Score nominations. He also has a nomination for Original Song. However, he has never won, and his 13 nominations place him just one behind the late, great Alex North for most without an Oscar win.

This will not be the year Newman finally breaks through and has his name read out. The score is typically wonderful work from Newman, but it comes in a film that was not otherwise popular, either with the Academy or the public. Passengers is certainly the biggest film on this list in terms of scale, but Newman does not fall into the trap of going for full bombast where something subtler will do. It takes a composer of skill and courage to rely on the slow build of tension within these compositions when the action would seem to beg for something grander. It is laudable, admirable work from one of the best film composers around, and that is something to be cherished, awards or not.

The final analysis

Anyone else but Hurwitz winning would be an absolute shock. It would be an early indication perhaps La La Land is not as strong as perceived and could be in danger in other categories as well. But that is not what is going to happen. The beautifully composed music from the wonderful and well-liked musical will take this award in a walk.

Will win: La La Land

Should win: Jackie

Should have been here: Moana

Tomorrow: Best Original Song

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Production Design

The film within the film in Hail, Caesar!, nominated for Best Production Design. 

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 leading up to the ceremony for analysis of each of the Academy’s 24 categories and more.

Best Production Design

The nominees are:

Arrival

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Hail, Caesar!

La La Land

Passengers

I do not believe the semantics of genre are that important to the Academy. Others will argue and have argued a bias against horror and science fiction or a bias for costume drama and inspiring true stories – if such a thing can be considered a genre. I find these arguments reductive and unconvincing. However, in this one area, I am sympathetic. No non-period, non-fantasy film has won Best Production Design, or whatever other names by which the award has gone over time, in 40 years. If it is not a bias, it is certainly a blind spot.

In fact, it has been 15 years since a contemporary non-fantasy film was even nominated – just nominated! – for this award. That was Amelie in 2001, which of course lost to Moulin Rouge!, a period musical with elements of fantasy. Fifteen years! What can you do but throw up your hands at that point? The truth is with many of the design categories, “best” means “most,” and the perceived degree of difficulty for contemporary film is not as high.

That brings us to this year and the question of whether Damien Chazelle’s Hollywood musical La La Land ends the nomination drought. It is of course contemporary. Does it contain a fantastical element or two? Undoubtedly. Specifically, the opening musical number and the planetarium sequence, but both are set within the world we inhabit. It is not committed to gritty realism, nor should it be, but it does not drift into the genre of fantasy. That would be a stretch.

These questions, of course, matter little. It would be nice to see a contemporary film nominated and win, if only to re-establish the art of contemporary design work as being as formidable as period or fantasy work. If La La Land is the film that can do that, I say, embrace it.

La La Land – On top of that, how cool that the honor would be for the first couple of production design, David Wasco and Sandy Reynolds-Wasco. Neither production designer Wasco nor set decorator Reynolds-Wasco has been nominated before, but the husband-and-wife duo is responsible for some of the most memorable and iconic films of the ’90s. Their collaborations with Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill Vols. 1 and 2, Inglourious Basterds) and Wes Anderson (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums) are legend.

What all of those films have in common, apart from World War II-set Inglourious Basterds, is that they are contemporary films set in our worlds. Wasco and Reynolds-Wasco make the world we inhabit wondrous, and they have done so again in La La Land. From the seedy jazz clubs to the bright, bustling to studio lots to the Griffith Observatory itself, they find the magic in the everyday lives of Chazelle’s characters and they bring it to the forefront. If they cannot break the fantasy/period spell cast over the Academy, no one can.

Arrival – The plot centers around two key locations. There are brief interludes and short sequences elsewhere, but most of the action in Arrival takes place inside the alien ship and in the army tent that serves as human basecamp in the film. They are a study in contrasts – the spare, cavernous ship, which resembles a seed outside and in, against the busy, cluttered command center, which is full of papers and screens. These differences are not solely cosmetic or practical but thematic. Humanity is blind and hiding behind what it thinks it knows. The aliens tellingly have nothing to hide.

Production designer Patrice Vermette, who has worked on director Denis Villenueve’s past four films – Prisoners, Enemy, Sicario, and Arrival – is a previous nominee for The Young Victoria in 2009. Meanwhile, this is set decorator Paul Hotte’s first nomination, though he was the head set dresser on Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, which won this category in 2004. On a mostly unrelated note – though, those of you who know my love of horror film will understand – one of Hotte’s earliest credits was for assistant props on David Cronenberg’s body-horror masterpiece The Fly.

Hail, Caesar! – Joel and Ethan Coen are marvels, and even their misfires are more interesting than the best efforts of lesser directors. Despite being a fan of the Coens and of old Hollywood, Hail, Caesar! and its willfully abstruse plotting left me cold and underwhelmed. It is a fun, zany ride all the way through, of course, but at the end, it does not feel like it amounts to much, particularly set against even the Coens’ other comedies such as Fargo or A Serious Man. This is the Brothers in The Big Lebowski mode, which I know is some people’s bag, but it isn’t mine.

However, no one working on a Coen Brothers film ever gives less than 100 percent, and longtime Coen collaborators production designer Jess Gonchor and set decorator Nancy Haigh are no exception. Their reproduction of a 1950s Hollywood studio backlot is lovely, a world unto itself in which the audience is happy to be lost. It is kind of remarkable this is only Gonchor’s second nomination after his notice for the Coens’ True Grit, despite his work on Capote, A Serious Man, and Inside Llewyn Davis, all of which would have been worthy of the honor. Haigh, on the other hand, is a seven-time nominee who previously won for Bugsy.

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them – Is it me, or could only a film in the Harry Potter franchise – or maybe The Lord of the Rings – be burdened with such a cumbersome title and still make a profit? Anyway, the Harry Potter films never really caught on in a big way with the Academy, but four of the series’ eight films found room in Production Design. The team of art director Stuart Craig and set decorator Stephanie McMillan were nominated for the first, fourth, and final two installments. Craig returns here for Fantastic Beasts, while Anna Pinnock steps in for McMillan, who died in 2013, as nominated set decorator.

Craig has a total of 11 nominations and three Oscar wins for Gandhi, Dangerous Liaisons, and The English Patient. Pinnock won her first Oscar two years ago for The Grand Budapest Hotel, and this is her sixth nomination overall. The pair is likely nominated here for recreating 1920s New York City with great care and in painstaking detail, as well as for the great halls and cluttered offices of the wizarding world’s bureaucratic headquarters. This is the kind of big work in a fantasy blockbuster that has the power to win over voters.

Passengers – Is Passengers pretty to look at? You could say that. You could also say it lacks logic, characters, and motivation. Count me among those who were not impressed by director Morten Tyldum’s previous feature, Best Picture-nominated The Imitation Game, finding it simplistic and cliché-ridden. Here, Tyldum somehow manages to sneak under the low bar of expectations with a movie that is not just dumb but outright offensive and wastes solid performances from its charismatic leads.

But we’re here to talk about the Oscar-nominated production design, aren’t we? Production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas and set decorator Gene Serdena are two time nominees, Dyas previously for Inception and Serdena for Her. Like those two features, Passengers depicts a sterile near-future in which the messy edges of life are smoothed over for sleek, clean presentation, except this movie takes place on a big spaceship. I doubt if much of the Academy even saw this movie, let alone will be voting for it.

The final analysis

The only thing standing in the way of La La Land here is four decades of anti-contemporary bias. Arrival would be a handsome and deserving winner, but the work may be too subdued for this group. Interestingly, while a Best Picture nomination is a good indicator of strength in most of the other crafts categories, that has not been the case historically in Production Design.

The Academy has had no qualms about rewarding a big, heavily festooned picture that wears its design bona fides on its sleeve. Recent wins for films such as The Great Gatsby, Alice in Wonderland, and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street mean something like Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them cannot be counted out as a spoiler. In the end, though, I expect the Academy’s love for La La Land to win out and end the drought for contemporary film.

Will win: La La Land

Should win: La La Land

Should have been here: The Handmaiden

Tomorrow: Best Costume Design