Who will win the Oscars for Music?
Welcome to the latest edition of All the Music of All the World, our weekly series where we aim to share music worth being passionate about. Consider us a guide who can help you get the most out of your Victrola by giving you new music to listen to, or new ways to think about music you already know.
This weekend is the 98th Academy Awards show, more colloquially known as the Oscars. This last year felt like a great one for movies, and the Best Picture race is one of the better ones I can remember, with a mix of huge blockbusters (Sinners, F1), quiet sorta-indie movies (Train Dreams, The Secret Agent, Sentimental Value, Bugonia), movies that would be awful without Jessie Buckley (Hamnet), baroque freak-offs (Frankenstein), and One Battle After Another. I hope the movie (Marty Supreme) where Timothee Chalamet plays a ping-pongist who’s on the verge of alienating every human on earth wins.
But this is a music newsletter, for a music company, so it’s time to talk about the music that the film community will reward this weekend. The Best Original Song and Best Original Score categories have spent these last 80+ years ping-ponging between awarding the most straightforward, simple scores and most over-the-top songs and the most daring, original music in all movies. This year, the nominees represent both ends of those spectrums, and it’s up in the air who will walk with the little golden guys on Sunday. Allow me to make some predictions.
Best Original Score:
Nominees:
Bugonia by Jerskin Fendrix
Frankenstein by Alexandre Desplat
Hamnet by Max Richter
One Battle After Another by Jonny Greenwood
Sinners by Ludwig Goransson
Should Win: Jonny Greenwood should have won in 2007 for There Will Be Blood (which was disqualified for obscure reasons related to some of the music being performed live before), should have won in 2012 for The Master, and should have won for Phantom Thread in 2017. But in every year he was beaten by worse movies that were more crowd-pleasing, less “difficult” than the movies made by Greenwood’s collaborator Paul Thomas Anderson, and with less daring scores. One Battle After Another is Anderson’s most accessible movie ever, and Greenwood’s rousing, frantic score captures the big stakes of the movie’s future-of-America radicals and plotlines. He’s beyond due, give him the gold man.
Will Win: Goransson in a landslide; he’s the second coming of John Williams, a guy making incredible, movie-specific scores for giant movies that everyone actually sees. He’s won for Black Panther and Oppenheimer, and this is his best score of those three.
Best Original Song
Nominees
“Dear Me” from Diane Warren: Relentless; Music and Lyric by Diane Warren
“Golden” from KPop Demon Hunters; Music and Lyric by EJAE, Mark Sonnenblick, Joong Gyu Kwak, Yu Han Lee, Hee Dong Nam, Jeong Hoon Seo and Teddy Park
“I Lied To You” from Sinners; Music and Lyric by Raphael Saadiq and Ludwig Goransson
“Sweet Dreams of Joy” from Viva Verdi!; Music and Lyric by Nicholas Pike
“Train Dreams” from Train Dreams; Music by Nick Cave and Bryce Dessner; Lyric by Nick Cave
Should Win: You might want to put Diane Warren here; she’s been nominated in this category a whopping 16 times but never took home the Oscar. But it’s hard to deny the charms of “Golden,” the only song on this list that you’d actually sing along to in the grocery store when it comes on in 18 months. That counts for more than basically anything in this category’s history; the songs that win are the ones that break contain of the movie they’re in.
Will Win: This category has been the domain of animated kid movies since the Disney revival of 1989 when “Under the Sea” won from Little Mermaid. Call it the Animated Advantage. Plus, if you’ve talked to anyone under 10-years-old, you know this is the biggest cultural phenomenon of the last 12 months. Giving the trophy to K-Pop here is going to be the biggest moment on TikTok on Monday.
Underrated: Any time you get to hear Nick Cave singing about grizzlies, elks and bobcats, is a good time.
The Oscars are this Sunday, at 7pm ET.
--Andrew Winistorfer
