I present a truncated version of my usual in-depth category breakdowns. Here’s everything you can hear on screen in the below-the-line crafts.
Sound
Nominees
A Complete Unknown
Dune: Part Two
Emilia Pérez
Wicked
The Wild Robot
This is a bit of a flip on the direction this category has gone in the now-five years since the merger of sound editing and sound mixing into a single Best Sound Oscar. In recent years, action movies and war pictures have dominated the nominations with a single slot allotted to that year’s favored musical or musical-adjacent movie. This year, for all intents and purposes, we have three musicals in the Best Picture race, and they all ended up here in Best Sound.
The nomination for The Wild Robot is cool and a little out of left field, though wholly deserving. The island where much of the action takes place is as much a feat of sonic engineering as animation. As the lone non-Best Picture nominee in the group, it’s probably on the outside looking in, but good on the Sound branch for recognizing this work. If we’re being really honest, great animated films should show up in this category a lot more often than they do.
There is a scenario in which A Complete Unknown, Wicked, and Emilia Pérez split the vote as the three musicals in contention and Dune: Part Two slides right up the middle and snatches the award. I kind of like this theory for a couple reasons: 1) I wrote in this space last year that I would wager $5, sight unseen, on a Dune triumph in this category this year, so why contradict myself now?; 2) the musicals aren’t winning this award lately.
Since the merger, the winners have been Sound of Metal, Dune, Top Gun: Maverick, and The Zone of Interest. They beat, respectively, Soul, West Side Story, Elvis, and Maestro. Sound of Metal was a Best Picture nominee literally about sound and hearing and was a fantastic and deserving winner. The other three could broadly be categorized as war pictures, though of course The Zone of Interest and Top Gun are about as far apart on the spectrum of film as it is possible to be. The point is: The musicals haven’t been winning.
Dune: Part Two makes a lot of sense as a winner. The first film was a crafts juggernaut in 2021, winning six below-the-line Oscars. This year’s edition will not reach those heights, but there are some places where it might just be undeniable. The spoiler to look out for is Wicked, which has the potential to be this year’s below-the-line juggernaut. It has nominations in almost all of the same crafts categories as Dune: Part One did, it’s a box office mega-smash, and it’s beloved by the Academy.
However, for now, we’ll call this a “prove it” category, as in: show me that a musical can beat the action epic and I’ll believe it. Even if we think Emilia Pérez has been completely sunk by controversy, Wicked still is splitting the musical vote with A Complete Unknown, while Dune: Part Two stands alone as the only film of the exact type that has been winning this award lately. So, we’ll ride with stats and the sandworms.
Will win: Dune: Part Two
Should win: Dune: Part Two
Should have been here: Civil War
Original Score
Nominees
The Brutalist
Conclave
Emilia Pérez
Wicked
The Wild Robot
This is a battle between The Brutalist and Conclave. Wicked is more about the songs being sung than the music in between, and I have no idea how much of the score is ported over from the Broadway show. It must be original enough to pass through the Academy’s arcane eligibility rules, so that certainly says something. Despite featuring some of the worst songs in movie musical history, the score by Clement Ducol and Camille is actually pretty good. The Wild Robot, meanwhile, is a lovely piece of work by jazz pianist Kris Bowers who just won an Academy Award last year as co-director of the winning documentary short, The Last Repair Shop.
Daniel Blumberg’s score for The Brutalist is as grand as it is intricate, subtly weaving its grandest themes into the most surprising of places. It feels like a throwback to the music that accompanied grand ol’ epics like Lawrence of Arabia, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, or Gone with the Wind. On the other hand, Volker Bertelmann, who won this award two years ago for All Quiet on the Western Front, has crafted another instantly recognizable and memorable score for an Edward Berger joint. It’s my favorite film music of the year, just as was All Quiet.
What this comes down to is how much you believe in the recent Conclave surge, evidenced by its best film win at BAFTA, best ensemble win at SAG, and best screenplay win at the Scripter Awards and BAFTA. I believe in the Conclave surge, but it has not won this award anywhere it has been nominated, and despite being a BAFTA favorite, it lost this category to Blumberg and The Brutalist. So, I’ll go with my gut and head here over my heart and predict The Brutalist.
Will win: The Brutalist
Should win: Conclave
Should have been here: Saturday Night
Original Song
Nominees
“Never Too Late” from Elton John: Never Too Late
“El Mal” from Emilia Pérez
“Mi Camino” from Emilia Pérez
“Like a Bird” from Sing Sing
“The Journey” from The Six Triple Eight
Not to sound like a broken record, but this remains the worst category at the Academy Awards. That’s accounting for the fact that recent years have had some fun stuff nominated and winning, including a double dose of Billie Eilish and Finneas, “Naatu Naatu” from RRR, and “I’m Just Ken” from Barbie. Those latter two songs even served as the centerpieces of their respective ceremonies, providing a necessary jolt of energy at the midway point of the show. There is nothing in that league nominated this year, and the producers mercifully have cut the performances from the show.
Diane Warren, of course, is back for the eighth consecutive year and 10th of the past 11. Her nomination this year got me to watch my first Tyler Perry movie, The Six Triple Eight. It was fine. Good performances. Manipulative. Predictable. And “The Journey” is not even the best original song to play during the credits of this movie. That distinction belongs to Pharell Williams’ “Sort It Out,” performed by The Clark Sisters.
There was a time when Warren wrote legitimately good movie songs that were not just ending credits songs meant to be nominated for Oscars. In honor of that and on this, the occasion of her 16th nomination, here are the top three Diane Warren songs nominated for an Academy Award:
3. “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” from Mannequin – I’ll be honest: I don’t know if this Starship song is actually good, per se, but as a kid who loved Mannequin, there was no greater earworm than that title phrase repeated over and over in the chorus. This was her first nomination, and she ran into the buzzsaw of “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” from Dirty Dancing.
2. “How Do I Live” from Con Air – a LeAnn Rimes megahit that is probably a little too earnest for the ridiculous movie we just watched, but it works in the moment and the song remains a banger. It lost to “My Heart Will Go On” from Titanic, which, you know, fair enough.
1. “I Don’t Want to Miss a Thing” from Armageddon – as performed by Aerosmith, truly one of the great blockbuster movie ballads, deployed at precisely the perfect moment by Michael Bay in an otherwise mostly silly affair. This probably was Warren’s best chance at a win, too, since this is an objectively better song than “When You Believe” from The Prince of Egypt, which won that year.
Anyway, Elton John: Never Too Late is a terrible documentary and the song is lame. Sing Sing is a great movie, but “Like a Bird” is forgettable. And, we covered the Warren bit. The winner is going to be one of the songs from the musical with 13 nominations. Considering Emilia Pérez is almost wall-to-wall musical numbers, it’s a little shocking they were unable to nominate two good songs.
Honestly, I barely remember which one “Mi Camino” is. If the Music branch had any guts, they’d have nominated “La Vaginoplastia,” which is just about the wildest song ever to appear in a musical. Regardless, “El Mal” is the best song in the movie, and it’s the showstopping moment that is probably most responsible for Zoe Saldaña’s front-runner status in Supporting Actress, so we’ll go with that.
Will win: “El Mal” from Emilia Pérez
Should win: “El Mal” from Emilia Pérez
Should have been here: “Sick in the Head” from Kneecap
