While this year’s Original Score nominees are a blend of some of the Oscars’ familiar faces and industry veterans finally getting their due, several of the composers in the race are landing nominations for extending beyond their comfort zone, or they’re finally landing nominations after numerous films with some of their most frequent collaborators. The scores heard here may be unlike most other music you’re familiar with from Nicholas Britell, Hans Zimmer or Jonny Greenwood, but in all cases the compositions are among their best and most personal.
DON’T LOOK UP, Nicholas Britell
Despite Nicholas Britell’s frequent collaborations with Adam McKay, his two Oscar nominations have come for his elegant, austere compositions for Barry Jenkins’ films. For Don’t Look Up, however, Britell experimented with a lively and jazzy big band sound that keeps the whole movie on its toes. “There’s a real profundity to the film, but at the same time it’s a breakneck comedy with a bombastic certainty to it,” Britell said. “The big-band jazz that I wrote was trying to capture the feeling of anxiety and losing control.”
DUNE, Hans Zimmer
Hans Zimmer received his 12th Oscar nomination for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune, which he approached with the goal of “building a sonic world” within the film, one in which he could twist instruments like a cello to resemble a Tibetan long horn or create percussive rhythms electronically that were designed to be impossible for human beings to play. “If you set something in the future, you wanted that foreign-ness,” Zimmer said. “Why would you rely on the Western vocabulary?” The result is a score that has both sweep and exotic, experimental intricacy.
ENCANTO, Germaine Franco
Germaine Franco is the first ever Latina woman nominated in the Best Original Score category at the Oscars and the first Latina composer to join the Academy’s music branch, having already worked on Coco and many other animated films. But she made sure the sounds in Encanto had a specific, personal touch with its lively, Afro-Colombian flavor peppered between Lin-Manuel Miranda’s songs. “I wanted to stay within the Disney environment, but also how do we make it fit regionally to Colombia and Latin America?” she said. “It’s really pan-Latin in the end, I think.”
PARALLEL MOTHERS, Alberto Iglesias
Despite three prior Oscar nominations to his name as a composer, Spain’s Alberto Iglesias has never before been nominated for a film by Pedro Almodóvar, with whom he has collaborated since 1995 across 13 films. For Parallel Mothers, Iglesias wrote themes for each of the mother characters that are distinct but noticeably echo one another. And you can hear it in the score’s dueling strings orchestrations and a persistent tambourine that gives Almodóvar’s film the pacing and tone of a moody thriller.
THE POWER OF THE DOG, Jonny Greenwood
Jonny Greenwood’s dark and propulsive score for The Power of the Dog sounds far more contemporary and brooding than one might expect for a Western, but the composer and Radiohead guitarist slyly peppers in instruments and influences that keep Jane Campion’s film rooted to the genre. And the bassy and plodding plucks of acoustic guitar throughout the film’s main theme keeps the mood constantly foreboding. The Academy has previously recognized Greenwood with a nomination for Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread, and his equally beguiling score for Spencer also landed on this year’s shortlist.
Steve’s Perspective
All season long, the two standouts have been Hans Zimmer’s massive Dune score and Jonny Greenwood’s unnerving Power of the Dog one. Dune has won almost all the early awards—but the big exception has been from the Society of Composers and Lyricists, who gave their award to Germaine Franco for Encanto and who correctly predicted the winners in this category in both of their previous years.
