As announced last Thursday, 97 movies are eligible for nominations in the Original Score category for the 84th Academy Awards. Not included were a couple of scores that have been considered possible contenders. The two most notable omissions from the Academy’s finalists list are Drive and My Week with Marilyn, which both were disqualified for different reasons.

The score for Nicolas Winding-Refn’s Drive composed by Cliff Martinez has received the Boston Society of Film Critics‘ Best Use of Music in Film prize (tied with Ludovic Bource’s score for The Artist), the runner-up award by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, as well as nominations from the Broadcast Film Critics Association and the Washington DC Area and London Critics Film Circle. As reported in Variety, the score was disqualified by the Academy because a number of songs were playing at key dramatic points during the film instead of the score, and two other composers were listed on the official studio cue sheet in addition to Martinez.

Also not included on the Academy’s finalists list is My Week with Marilyn, which features a score composed by Conrad Pope. Alexandre Desplat has written the main theme for the film, which Pope adapted into his score. According to Variety, the Academy ruled that Desplat’s theme had an impact that was “too great to overlook”.

Also disqualified was Marco Beltrami‘s score for Soul Surfer for also having too many names on the cue sheet. The composer has received the Satellite Award in the Best Score category. Beltrami still has two other scores in the race, including The Thing and Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark (co-scored with Buck Sanders). The Academy also decided to disqualify Michael Giacchino‘s score for the indie comedy drama 50/50 as the movie’s songs were thought of “diluting” the impact of the score. Giacchino has four other scores in contention (Super 8, Monte Carlo, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and Cars 2), more than any other composer this year except Thomas Newman who also has four titles in the race.

In addition, none of Hans Zimmer‘s scores from 2011 were submitted to the Academy as he chose to sit out this year’s Oscar race as reported in October. Among the five movies featuring the composer’s music that were released this year, Gore Verbinski’s Rango seemed like the most likely score that could have been nominated, but none of his entries (which also include Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows and Kung Fu Panda 2, co-scored with John Powell) would have made our frontrunner list (to be published in a couple of days).

A number of other scores from major movies of this year didn’t end up on the finalists list, most likely because they were not submitted or considered unlikely to qualify or to be nominated. Here are a couple of our favorite scores among this year’s omissions:

The Beaver – Marcelo Zarvos
A Dangerous Method – Howard Shore
Mars Needs Moms – John Powell
The Muppets – Christophe Beck (unreleased)
Priest – Christopher Young
Source Code – Chris Bacon
The Tree of Life – Alexandre Desplat (mostly unused in the film)
The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1 – Carter Burwell

  1. Justin Boggan says:

    Well, this is speculation, but seeing as how both “Drive” and “My Week with Marilyn” were replacement scores, maybe they were too late to meet the qualification deadline.

    • Bond1965 says:

      No. They were disqualified for the reasons stated in the Variety article.