Category: Film Music News

On December 22, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences announced the movies eligible in the Best Original Score category for the 84th Academy Award. Among the 97 scores on the list, we think about a quarter of the titles have a realistic chance of getting one of the five nominations. Among those scores, there are ten titles that we consider to have frontrunner status (including two scores that should get nominated for sure). The other scores listed seem more like long shots, but past years have shown that surprise nominations are possible.

The Locks:

Ludovic Bource who has composed the score for the black-and-white romance The Artist has already won the European Film Award, the Best Use of Music in Film Award by the Boston Film Critics, as well as as the Best Score Award by the Washington DC Film Critics. Bource also received a Golden Globe and a Broadcast Film Critics Association Award nomination. The fact that the movie doesn’t feature any dialogue makes the music carry a much heavier load than in a most other pictures and the score has been singled out in an unusually large number of film reviews. In addition, the universal acclaim of the film, as well its Oscar chances in other categories (including Best Pictures) makes The Artist our current pick to win the award unless the controversy around the limited use of Bernard Herrmann’s score from Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo in the film keeps growing and ends up impacting some voters.

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