By Kathryn Kalinak
This year’s slate of contenders includes established pros (John Williams, Thomas Newman, Alexandre Desplat) along with some newcomers (William Butler and Owen Pallett, Steven Price). This used to be a category where you had to pay your dues, but no longer. The last three winners had never been nominated before. So the real surprise winner in this category would be Williams.
William Butler and Owen Pallett: Her
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Butler and Pallett already have a pocketful of awards and this is just the kind of “outsider” score (Butler and Pallett’s first nomination) that Academy voters love: remember Reznor and Ross winning for The Social Network? A win for Butler and Pallett makes the Academy seem hip and edgy and cool, not unimportant to an aging votership. Gravity is the favorite to win here, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the statuette goes to Her. Its use of acoustic instruments (that piano!) brings coziness to the sterile interiors and even the electronic instruments radiate warmth. The score is crucial in helping us to understand the characters in the film and feel for them. This wouldn’t be the same film without the score.
Alexandre Desplat: Philomena
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Desplat has done some remarkable work in the last few years (Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, The King’s Speech, The Queen, Harry Potter, Fantastic Mr. Fox—a personal favorite) and he’s the go-to composer for films about England and now Ireland. But he’s perennially overlooked by Academy voters (he’s lost five times in the last seven years and for some amazing work—come on, Academy)! I don’t think this is his year. Philomena doesn’t have a high enough profile in the Oscar race. I would LOVE to be wrong about this. Desplat deserves an Oscar for something and why not for Philomena—it’s a heartfelt film with an equally heartfelt score.
Thomas Newman: Saving Mr. Banks
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Newman has twelve nominations and no wins but I don’t think this year is going to change that. Saving Mr. Banks was almost completely overlooked by the Academy (this is its only nomination) and Newman’s style of big symphonic scoring hasn’t found favor in recent years with Academy voters. (See John Williams below).
Steven Price: Gravity
*clip from film includes “Debris” from the soundtrack
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Gravity is the front runner here. The trailer’s tag line reads “At 372 miles above the earth, there is nothing to carry sound.” Except the soundtrack…which is filled with the score. Big, noticeable, dare I say it—intrusive, this is the kind of score you can’t fail to notice…even if you try. John Williams meets Hans Zimmer.
John Williams: The Book Thief
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This is Williams’ forty-ninth nomination—but The Book Thief doesn’t have the visibility of other films in this category and Academy voters of late have failed to embrace the kind of big symphonic scores, like this one, that routinely won Oscars back in the twentieth century. Lush, melodic, memorable—vintage Williams. Like Newman for Saving Mr. Banks, Williams would be an upset.
Will win: Steven Price for Gravity
Should win: William Butler and Owen Pallett for Her
Kathryn Kalinak is Professor of English and Film Studies at Rhode Island College. Her extensive writing on film music includes numerous articles as well as the books Settling the Score: Music in the Classical Hollywood Film and How the West was Sung: Music in the Westerns of John Ford. She is author of Film Music: A Very Short Introduction.
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The post Best Original Score: Who will win (and who should!) appeared first on OUPblog.
By Kathryn Kalinak
The world of film lost one of the greats on Sunday: composer John Barry. British by birth, he carved a place for himself in Hollywood, winning five Oscars over the course of his career. He cut his teeth on James Bond films – Dr. No, (1962), From Russia With Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964), Thunderball (1965) – and went on to compose seven more. There was something both elegant and hip about these scores, a kind of jazzy sophistication that connoted fast cars, beautiful women, and martinis, shaken not stirred, that is. A jack of all musical trades, he turned to Born Free (1966) and gave it a lush symphonic score and hit song. By 1966, when he won his first Academy Awards (and he won two that year: Best Song and Best Score for Born Free), he became one of the most high profile film composers in the world. He was only 33.
He had an eclectic taste when it came to choosing films – small independent films, huge studio epics, and everything in between – coupled with wide-ranging and versatile compositional skill that could produce a twangy country and western-inspired score for Midnight Cowboy (1969), a jazz-infused score for The Cotton Club (1984), an anxiety-filled score for The Ipcress File (1965), a sensual score for Body Heat (1981), a synthesized score for The Jagged Edge (1985), and a symphonic sound for Out of Africa (1985). He will largely be remembered, though, for those Bond scores – as well he should. They musically define the texture of those films, their time and place, and above all Bond himself with the electric guitar riff that Barry brought to the 007 theme.
But it is the score for Dances With Wolves (1990) that I will remember him for. Like Out of Africa, it is lush, symphonic, melody-laden. But like no other western score that I know of, it manages to avoid the stereotypes for Indians that riddle many of Hollywood’s best western film scores. And I am certainly not the first or the only one to notice this: no tom-tom rhythms, no modal harmonies, no use of fourths and fifths, no dissonance to represent the Sioux
Geoffrey Block, Distinguished Professor of Music History at the University of Puget Sound, is the author of Enchanted Evenings: The Broadway Musical From Show Boat to Sondheim and Lloyd Webber. The book offers theater lovers an illuminating behind-the-scenes tour of some of America’s best loved, most admired, and most enduring musicals, as well as a riveting history. In the original post Block challenges readers to test their Tony knowledge. We will post the answers next Wednesday so be sure to check back.
1. Who is Tony?
2. What was the first musical to win the Tony for Best Score?
3. What was the first musical to win the Tony for Best Musical?
4. What was the second musical to win the Tony for Best Musical?
Hint: This show made its debut only a little more than three months after the first winner.
5. In what year were the Tony Awards first nationally televised?
6. Who has the most Tony Award wins in the Best Score category?
7. What other lyricists and composers (or lyricist-composers) have won two or more Tony’s in the Best Score category?
8. Who has received more Tony’s than anyone else since the awards were established?
9. One winning musical in the Best Score category was the only musical nominated that year.
10. What year produced arguably the most impressive line-up of Tony nominated musicals?
11. So far there has been only one tie in the Best Musical category? Name the two shows.
12. Fourteen times in the last fifty years the Best Musical and Best Score winners were not the same. No less than half of these disparities have occurred in the past twelve years. What are the names of these last seven shows that won the Tony for Best Musical but not Best Score? What shows did win for Best Score in those years?
13. Name the two Best Musicals that went on to win Best Picture Oscars.
14. Name the three Best Musicals losers that went on to win Best Picture Oscars.
15. Starting in 1994, the Tony Awards decided to make the Best Musical Revival its own category instead of forcing musicals to share the award with revivals of plays. In the years since, the Best Musical Revival category has often proven to be fiercely competitive. Name the three winning revivals that first appeared before the launching of the Tony Awards and the four winning revivals that did not win a Tony Award for Best Musical the season of their Broadway debut.
16. The Four Questions: What show won the Tony for Best Musical in 1984? What Pulitzer Prize winning show lost that year? Who wrote the winning score? What controversial remarks did the winner utter on national television?
17. One composer had been dead for nearly 70 years when he won for Best Score. Who was this composer and what musical did he write?
Lauren, Publicity Assistant
Kathryn Kalinak is Professor of English and Film Studies at Rhode Island College. Below, she reflects on Sunday’s Oscar (Original 
Score) presentation, and her own predictions from Friday, presented both here on OUPBlog, and on WNYC’s Soundcheck.
And congratulations to Joseph Brown! In last week’s contest, he correctly predicted both Oscar Music category winners. Joseph will be receiving a copy of Kathryn’s most recent book, Film Music: A Very Short Introduction.
If there was a surprise in the Original Score Oscar race Sunday, it was only the break dancing performances accompanying selections from the five nominated scores. Compared to the other presentations, the break dancing seemed to me a shameless grab for a youthful demographic. The Writing nominees, for instance, were announced with images of screenplays projected over corresponding scenes—an effective reminder of what a film owes to its writing. Yet the Academy could not come up with a better way to honor this year’s fine slate of scores? To have watched a scene from Sherlock Holmes without Hans Zimmer’s eclectic instrumentation, and then to have watched it with all the tension and excitement lent by the score would have surely been a more appropriate way to showcase the importance of music in film.
The composers of this year’s Original Scores are all deserving, hard-working, and extremely talented. Although I predicted Michael Giacchino would receive an Oscar for his work on Up—as he did—this is one year I wouldn’t have minded being wrong.
Though I appreciate Giacchino’s beautifully melodic score, Alexandre Desplat is due! For Fantastic Mr. Fox he used instruments like a mandolin, ukulele, celeste, banjo, and a Jew’s harp to create a whimsical and inventive sound—the perfect match for such a quirky stop-action animated film. With six film scores in 2009, four in 2008, and six in 2007, Desplat might be Hollywood’s hardest working composer. He’s already scored a film currently in theaters (The Ghost Writer), and five more are in post-production, including the newest Harry Potter film. Given Desplat’s incredible productivity, we shouldn’t have to wait long for another nomination, or (hopefully) a win.
Lauren, Publicity Assistant
Kathryn Kalinak is Professor of English and Film Studies at Rhode Island College. Her extensive writing on film music includes numerous articles and several books, the most recent of which is Film Music: A Very Short Introduction. Below, she has made predictions for the Oscar Music (Original Score) category, and picked her favorites.
We want to know your thoughts as well! Who do you think will win the Oscar for Original Score? Original Song? Send your predictions to [email protected] by tomorrow, March 6, with the subject line “Oscars” and we’ll send a free copy of Film Music: A Very Short Introduction to the first 5 people who guessed correctly.
We also welcome you to tune in to WNYC at 2pm ET today to hear Kathryn discuss Oscar-nominated music on Soundcheck.
This Sunday’s Oscars will recognize an exceptionally fine slate of film scores, and it’s nice to see such a deserving group of composers. The nominees represent a range of films and scores including the lush and symphonic (Avatar), whimsical (Fantastic Mr. Fox), edgy and tension-producing (The Hurt Locker), eclectic and genre-bending (Sherlock Holmes), and beautifully melodic (Up). While there are always surprises, I’ve considered each composer and score, coming to the following conclusions and predictions.
On Avatar:
James Horner has been around a long time, having been nominated ten times in the last 32 years, and receiving Best Score and Best Song Oscars for Titanic. He’s a pro at what he does best: big, symphonic scores that hearken back to the classical Hollywood studio years. Horner’s music gives Avatar exactly what it needs—warmth and emotional resonance—and connects the audience to a series of images and characters that might be difficult to relate to otherwise. If Horner wins Sunday night, look for the evening to go Avatar’s way.
On Fantastic Mr. Fox
