We were hardly surprised that AMPAS’s notoriously insular and tony music branch took a hard pass on Atticus Ross and Trent Reznor’s meme-tastic, Golden Globe- and Critics’ Choice Award-winning score for Challengers. While the branch’s voters welcomed Ross-Reznor to the club long ago (they’ve won twice), one wouldn’t need to examine the history of what’s been shortlisted but snubbed too closely to know that piledriver beats that sound straight out of a poppers trainer video were probably never going to connect with the same demographic that just last year gave John Williams a record-extending 54th Oscar nomination.
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Of course, getting the nomination is only half the battle, and for all the music branch’s efforts to keep its peers’ most unorthodox work at bay, voters at large feel less resistant these days to taking bigger swings—hence Steven Price’s Gravity beating Alexandre Desplat’s Philomena, Ludwig Göransson’s Black Panther besting Terence Blanchard’s BlacKkKlansman, and (perhaps most tellingly) Hildur Guðnadóttir’s Joker upsetting Thomas Newman’s 1917.
With that in mind, we see no reason why Daniel Blumberg’s idiosyncratic, varied, and full-ranging work on The Brutalist—which isn’t “traditionally” epic, instead going for something far more chameleonic—should have no trouble nudging past former winner Volker Bertelmann’s four-square suspense pizzicato strings for Conclave and industry darling Kris Bowers’s triumphalism for The Wild Robot. As for Emilia Pérez, better luck in the other music category.
Will Win: The Brutalist
Could Win: Conclave
Should Win: The Brutalist
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