The Last Cinema Standing Countdown to the Oscars is your guide to the Academy Awards. We will cover each of the categories in depth, talk about history and what the award truly means, and predict some winners. Check back all month as we make our way to the big show, one category (each as important as the next) at a time.
Best Original Score
The nominees are:
Don’t Look Up
Dune
Encanto
Parallel Mothers
The Power of the Dog
With the rise of world music and the advent of increasingly experimental approaches, Original Score has trended toward becoming one of the most fascinating and fun categories each year at the Oscars. So, of course, it will not be awarded on the live show. Remember 2010, when the producers of the show opted to highlight the Score nominees with a series of interpretive dances? I complained a lot about that, then, finding it silly and tonally strange. Now, I would take interpretive dance in a heartbeat if it meant getting the awards on the broadcast.
Once again, the logic of luring viewers to the show by stuffing the three-hour broadcast with popular films that have nothing to do with the Oscars does not really hold when you cut categories such as this. Look at the last three winners: Soul, a Pixar film scored in part by Trent Reznor; Joker, a billion-dollar-grossing comic book movie the Academy would kill to feature on their show; and Black Panther, one of the most popular and successful films ever made.
Now look at this year’s nominees: Dune, a widely admired science-fiction blockbuster; Encanto, one of the most buzzed-about Disney films of recent years with a wildly popular soundtrack (which we will talk more about in our next entry in this series); Don’t Look Up, one of the most watched movies in Netflix history, starring one of the biggest actors in the world; The Power of the Dog, another popular Netflix entry with music by Radiohead guitarist Jonny Greenwood; and Parallel Mothers, which while perhaps a niche box office film, features music by one of the most well known composers in the Spanish-speaking world and could easily help draw the global audience the Academy desperately needs.
The Power of the Dog – I was watching There Will Be Blood over the weekend, and it made me mad all over again that Greenwood does not already have an Oscar. That score is one of the great modern pieces of film music, but due to the Music Branch’s arcane rules, it was not even eligible for a nomination. He has not composed too many scores in the interim, mostly working with Paul Thomas Anderson or Lynn Ramsay. Then, this year, we got three. Lucky us. He worked again with Anderson on Licorice Pizza, wrote the towering score for Spencer, and crafted this beautiful, daring piece of music.
A twisty, unnerving tale, The Power of the Dog requires music that creates a mood and an atmosphere, rather than driving the action or playing the emotions. Greenwood’s disturbing, out-of-tune piano tracks provide the perfect background, helping Jane Campion’s film take the audience to places darker than we would otherwise dare. As viewers, we are never sure of our footing in this story, and the haunting melodies of the score keep us constantly off balance. One wishes Greenwood would compose more, if only so we could have more music like this at the cinema.
Dune – Hans Zimmer is a living legend. He has just one Oscar from 11 nominations (The Lion King in 1994), but for years, he has stood at the forefront of changing what a blockbuster score can sound like. His collaborations with Christopher Nolan on the Dark Knight trilogy, as well as Inception, have created the modern template for big-budget movie music, which is all the more remarkable when you consider just how radical and inventive his scores have been.
That long tradition continues with Dune, a film for which Zimmer chose to invent whole new instruments to convey the otherworldliness of the story. Though on its surface Dune is a sci-fi/action picture, you will not find any of the classic John Williams-style brass leading the way. Instead, Zimmer gives us something deeper, more experimental, and evocative of the feeling the characters would have in being so out of their element. This is not a score of adventure but of trepidation and dread, and that is precisely for what the film calls.
Encanto – History all around with this nomination. Germaine Franco is just the 10th woman ever nominated in any of the Musical Score categories at the Oscars. She is the only Latinx woman ever nominated and the first Latinx woman to join the music branch of the Academy. We can chat all day about why it took so long and the need for further representation in this branch, but none of that takes away from Franco’s tremendous accomplishment.
How wonderful, then, that her nomination comes for a Disney animated film score that is so un-Disney like. All credit to Zimmer’s winning The Lion King score and the great Alan Menken, who really set the Disney standard with The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin, but Franco’s score represents a refreshing change of pace from that Disney house style. Franco, who is Mexican-American, brings in instruments that beautifully reimagine the rhythm and feel of the film’s Colombian setting. She organically fills in the spaces of these characters’ lives with music that does not overwhelm like so much animated music before but rather enhances.
Don’t Look Up – Known for his moody, atmospheric scores for Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk, Nicholas Britell goes a wholly different direction for this sprawling satire, and the result is thrilling. In a movie about the threat of global disaster and the possible end of all life on earth, one would probably expect the music to be big, booming, and ominous – honestly, resembling something Zimmer might do for a Nolan film. But, the Don’t Look Up soundtrack has far more in common with the poppy jazz of Rolfe Kent’s Sideways score than that of Interstellar.
Britell gives us the kind of jaunty horns and fleet-footed percussion that would sound right at home on a breaking news alert from hell, and in many ways, that is precisely what the movie is. The whole point of Don’t Look Up is to get your attention – that is what the characters want to do in the movie, and that is what the filmmakers want to do on a metatextual level – and Britell’s abrasive, contrapuntal jazz is the perfect accompaniment for a PSA at the end of the world.
Parallel Mothers – The way we talk about the collaboration between Steven Spielberg and John Williams is how we should talk about Pedro Almodóvar and Alberto Iglesias. Starting with The Flower of My Secret in 1995, Iglesias has provided the scores for 12 films by Almodóvar, who in turn has been the most popular and successful Spanish filmmaker in the world. Shockingly, despite that popularity and success and three previous Oscar nominations, Iglesias has never before been recognized by the Academy for a collaboration with Almodóvar.
For anyone unfamiliar with their collaborations or with Almodóvar’s work in general, they are often pitched at a very melodramatic emotional register, and Parallel Mothers is no exception. It takes a special kind of composer to work within these unique parameters, and Iglesias has always proven adept at suggesting emotion without overplaying his hand. Whether in the more propulsive, synth-driven compositions or the subtler, string and piano sections on the soundtrack, Iglesias is an expert at cluing the audience in to the emotion of a moment while never revealing the whole game.
The final analysis
If it is not evident, I love every one of these scores. Each would be a deserving winner, and for different reasons, I would be thrilled to see any one of these composers on stage with the award. However, this is not about what I want to happen but what I think will happen.
Parallel Mothers, despite a Best Actress nomination for star Penélope Cruz, is probably too little seen to challenge for the win. Britell will have his moment someday, but given the competition, it does not seem likely it will be this year. Despite a lovely score, Encanto has a much better shot in the Original Song category, and I would bet on the Academy to award it in only one of the two music categories.
That leaves us with Zimmer for Dune and Greenwood for The Power of the Dog. Zimmer beat Greenwood to the BAFTA, the Broadcast Critics Award, and the Golden Globe (which is not worth much in and of itself, except as evidence that a group of people may pick Dune when presented with both choices). Zimmer has been on the awards circuit, doing press and promoting the hell out of his work, while Greenwood – as you might expect from the guitarist of Radiohead – has been less like that.
In the end, though, it probably comes down to the work itself. The Power of the Dog may be too subtle, too insular for voters. It does not scream out for recognition. On the other hand, Dune is a massive undertaking. Zimmer poured everything into it, and it shows. That kind of work often gets rewarded by the Academy, and I expect it to be so rewarded again.
Will win: Dune
Should win: The Power of the Dog
Should have been here: Shiva Baby
Next time: Best Original Song
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