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2020 Oscars - Best Original Score predictions


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1 hour ago, Alex said:

 the music  feels like it was just written and then placed in the film, rather than being written for the film, if that makes sense.

 

Isn't that the case for most film music these days and almost every Zimmer score.

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Right. So you'd probably understand why voters are drawn to scores that actually make a distinct impression in film, regardless of compositional merit. At the end, it doesn't really matter if the music is good. The music has to be good in film. Not that those two things are mutually exclusive...

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Alex Ross, the music critic for The New Yorker wrote that Desplat's score for Little Women was a mere step above a score for a Hallmark holiday movie, maybe just half a step better:

 

He also liked that comment someone made about the score being awful and Desplat phoning it in.

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Desplat phoning it in, like JW, is usually superior to most other film music out there, at least from a technical standpoint.

 

No one really mentions Randy Newman, but I thought Marriage Story had a lovely little score. Suited the film perfectly I thought.

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In terms of impact in the movie, if I were an Academy voter, I'd vote for Thomas Newman. Of all the nominated scores, 1917 is the one that works best in the movie, followed by Joker.

 

As much as I like TROS as pure music, on the movie Abrams managed to butcher the score. 

 

Haven't watched Little Women and Marriage Story.

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On 2/3/2020 at 2:11 PM, Edmilson said:

I guess this is the tendency these days, the more minimalistic and droning, and the less emotion besides moodiness and maybe dread your score has, the more awards you are going to get. Case in point, Hildur's own Chernobyl. You just record some ambient sounds, manipulate them on the computer to ~create tension~ and there you have it, your very tense score that is going to be a success.

I think Herrmann would be an award darling these days, for all the wrong reasons---and then hate the s out of the people giving him awards.

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I wanted to give my impressions on the 5 nominees:

 

- The Rise of Skywalker: this is the score I enjoyed the most and also, the one I think is the better. I'm biased because that's the style of music that I enjoy the most and because Williams is still my favourite composer but, even I didn't like at all the movie and feel that the score is not well used there, the composition is so good that (unrealistically) I want it to win.

- 1917: I didn't like the score before seeing the movie and I couldn't finish listening to the FYC promo the first time. After seeing the movie, everything changed. I like this score very much. Is not always excellent but it has some great minutes in it. Maybe is because between the score nominees this is the better movie, but the score is just perfect with the images. It's epic when it has to be, emotional the it's needed, there's silence when the movie needs that... I would be happy if Thomas Newman wins for this one.

- Little Women: by no means this is a bad score but IMHO is a boring score. I couldn't care for the music with the movie and outside I still feel it lacks "something". I'm sure that people that knows more music than me can find the subtleties on Desplat's composition but I find it dull. Pretty, but boring.

- A Marriage Story: I don't have anything against this score, but also anything in favor. Is short and nice but not better than the majority of music composed last year.

- Joker: I'm sure this will win, I knew it when the Oscars run started, and it makes me a little bit sad and annoyed. Again, I'm sure that musical experts can find greatness here but not me. Is the most contemporary and also the most generic score of the bunch. The music of Guðnadóttir could fit in any thriller, drama or sci-fi movie... I don't find the character of Joker in the music, or the city, or any distinctive thing. Also, this is the movie that has the more pop music material, all the "iconic" moments in the movie have a preexisting song in it and that's the real reason the academics will vote for it.

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Will be interesting to see if JW receives any more nominations after this. They’ve already started to replace him with Desplat as the “token nominee” every year.

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1 hour ago, DrTenma said:

I wanted to give my impressions on the 5 nominees:

 

- The Rise of Skywalker: this is the score I enjoyed the most and also, the one I think is the better. I'm biased because that's the style of music that I enjoy the most and because Williams is still my favourite composer but, even I didn't like at all the movie and feel that the score is not well used there, the composition is so good that (unrealistically) I want it to win.

- 1917: I didn't like the score before seeing the movie and I couldn't finish listening to the FYC promo the first time. After seeing the movie, everything changed. I like this score very much. Is not always excellent but it has some great minutes in it. Maybe is because between the score nominees this is the better movie, but the score is just perfect with the images. It's epic when it has to be, emotional the it's needed, there's silence when the movie needs that... I would be happy if Thomas Newman wins for this one.

- Little Women: by no means this is a bad score but IMHO is a boring score. I couldn't care for the music with the movie and outside I still feel it lacks "something". I'm sure that people that knows more music than me can find the subtleties on Desplat's composition but I find it dull. Pretty, but boring.

 

I'm not quite as hyped about TROS as you are, but it is the one score of the bunch that I liked right from the word go. I don't think it makes it the best score though, somehow....

 

I agree 100% on 1917 and Little Women. (Haven't seen the latter, but the score is unbelievably boring to me).

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35 minutes ago, Richard Penna said:

 

I'm not quite as hyped about TROS as you are, but it is the one score of the bunch that I liked right from the word go. I don't think it makes it the best score though, somehow....

 

 

You're right, a great score also has to be well used in its movie. I probably should have said that I feel is the best music as a listening experience... 

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It's kind of depressingly funny how Hildur is getting all these awards, and yet if you go over to the Filmtracks forums, the annual "Filmtracks Community Awards" (almost 100 film music fans voted) doesn't feature a single score by her in the top 30... So how are these big-name awards so out-of-touch? If the consensus among people who actively engage with film music as a hobby, is that her scores don't deserve to be a top 10 (let alone to snag the #1 spot), then why on Earth are these awards taken seriously? It's a joke.

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3 minutes ago, Tydirium said:

the annual "Filmtracks Community Awards" (almost 100 film music fans voted)

 

Hey, we have a lot of film music fans here too, where's the JWFan Community Awards? :( 

 

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2 minutes ago, publicist said:

What for, every year a Williams score would win, even if he didn't write any.

 

Good point. Maybe the rule for us will have to be "No JW scores allowed". ;) Come to think of it, that would actually be pretty interesting for a General Discussion thing.

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19 minutes ago, publicist said:

98% of the users never listen to anything save for the same three blockbuster scores. 

 

Yeah, but not only listen to the OST, but also to the FYC, and then stress over 15 second tracks missing from both of them. ;)

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18 minutes ago, publicist said:

And here, ladies and gentlemen, you have it black on white why wasting your time on this (and probably other) awards is pure nonsense:

 

“Every time that ‘Joker’ ad comes on TV with that weird violin, I’m like, ‘Oh god, turn it off! Turn it off!’ But, I mean, come on, how many Oscars can John Williams and Randy Newman win? I know it’s so stupid to think like that but I’m sort of influenced by that. I might still vote for ‘Joker’ even though I can’t stand the score and haven’t seen the film because it’s the first time a woman would win.”

 

by Anonymous Oscar voter

LOL.

 

I just don't get it. Now she is even called out for helping to redeem film music's reputation by a recent Pulitzer prize jury member. This professor who wrote this article was one of the five jury members for the Pulitzer prize for music two years ago or so:

 

https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/hildurg-gudnadottir-music-profile/ 

 

Her scores for HBO’s Chernobyl and Todd Phillips’s Joker bring soundtracks into the realm of high art.

 

Few insults hit a serious composer as hard as saying a piece of work “sounds like movie music” or, worse still, like “mood music.” The background function of a film score has stigmatized the genre as something insubstantial and inclined to cliché since the days of piano players tinkling away as silent pictures flickered in early movie houses. Mood music took hold as a genre with the introduction of the long-playing record, when albums of lush strings and sonic faux-exotica by schlocksters like Les Baxter were pitched as aural lubricants for bachelor-pad sex, and the contemporary variations on the form found on Spotify’s “chill” playlists are still considered less-than-major works by nature of their functionality as ambiance. Hildur Guðnadóttir, the composer from Iceland best known for her scores for the HBO miniseries Chernobyl and Todd Phillips’s comic-villain thriller Joker, has emerged from years of noble obscurity in the darker corners of the art-music world to help redeem the reputations of both movie music and mood music. In the past year, she’s won an Emmy and a Grammy for Chernobyl and a Golden Globe award and an Oscar nomination for her Joker score. As the headline of an Esquire piece on her newfound prominence announced, “‘Joker’ Composer Hildur Guðnadóttir Is Shaking Up the Industry.” More accurately, the mainstream entertainment industry is shaking itself up by allowing Guðnadóttir to do, in a high-profile way, the kinds of things she’s done in avant-garde circles for years.

 

Now 37, Guðnadóttir has been creating bold and imaginative music on her own and with a variety of collaborators since the first decade of the 21st century. In fact, she’s been performing publicly on her primary instrument, the cello, since girlhood, encouraged by her parents: her mother, the classical vocalist Ingveldur Guðrún Ólafsdóttir, and her father, Guðni Franzson, a clarinetist, composer, and conductor. After experimenting in various art-rock ensembles throughout Scandinavia and in Berlin, where she studied at the Universität der Künste, Guðnadóttir made her first solo album, Mount A, in 2006. Though it was released under the pseudonym Lost in Hindurness, Guðnadóttir made every sound on the recording, from the nonverbal vocals to the cello, piano, zither, vibraphone, gamelan, gamba (a Renaissance-era stringed instrument), and Mongolian khuur, which I’d never heard of till I read the liner notes. Recorded partly in a New York studio and partly in a house in the village of Hólar, Iceland (because she liked the way her cello sounded there), Mount A was rereleased in 2010 under Guðnadóttir’s own name. It is an exceptionally assured and strange recording debut, a DIY collage of sonic textures and tone colors by an artist open to the moment and hungry for surprise. “I think there shouldn’t be limits to what we’re allowed to say or express, as long as we don’t hurt anyone,” Guðnadóttir told an interviewer in an “All Access” video. “Music should be a form of free expression.” Her willingness (or eagerness) to venture into under-explored areas of emotionality was a hallmark of her music long before she gave voice to the brooding rage that festers into gleeful sadism in Joker. If her music won’t hurt anyone, she’s happy to conjure the sound of someone, like Joker, who will. After Mount A, Guðnadóttir worked as a cellist or composer on more than a dozen albums made in collaboration with electronic, art-pop, classical, or category-defiant musicians in Scandinavia, from established figures like Nico Muhly, Ben Frost, and the Swedish group the Knife to acts little known outside the Nordic world, like the short-lived Iceland band Rúnk and the Finnish techno duo Pan Sonic. What’s readily streamable of this output today, such as Muhly’s Speaks Volumes (2006), Frost’s Theories of Machines (2006), and Tu Non Mi Perderai Mai (a collaboration jointly credited to Guðnadóttir and the late Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson, also from 2006), only hints at the imaginative force of Guðnadóttir’s solo music. By 2009, when she released her second album, Without Sinking, Guðnadóttir was fully formed as an experimental composer and musician.

 

As on Mount A, she played multiple instruments and sang atmospheric, nonliteral sounds but added a trio of musicians—Jóhannsson on organ, Skúli Sverrisson on bass, and her father on clarinet and bass clarinet—to bring more colors and fuller body to the music. It is, in concept, programmatic music intended to suggest an encounter with a body of water in a place like Iceland, which is to say a place like no other. The 10 selections have simple titles such as “Elevation,” “Overcast,” “Ascent,” and “Into Warmer Air,” and the tracks feel at first like conventional ambient music. But unexpected things happen as their sounds unfurl. Acoustic instruments are overtaken by electronics, twisted around, and transformed. The familiar is disrupted by the unnamable. To take this as mood music is to allow your mood to spin and sink and land somewhere you’ve never been before. The essence of Guðnadóttir’s music as an agent of mood was recognized early as suitable to film scores. Beginning in 2011, she was commissioned to compose music, alone or with collaborators, for a series of European films, including Tobias Lindholm’s A Hijacking and Saul Dibb’s Journey’s End. When Jóhannsson died suddenly in the midst of writing music for Garth Davis’s Mary Magdalene, Guðnadóttir completed the score. Her music for that film was celebrated for its deft mingling of classical sonorities and electronics to bring timely resonance to characters from deep history, and Chernobyl and Joker followed. For Chernobyl, the British-made miniseries about the 1986 Soviet nuclear disaster, Guðnadóttir tapped her skill with nontraditional sounds and constructed a full musical score with no music. To evoke the grim, oppressive atmosphere of the film’s time and place, she toured the decommissioned nuclear facility used in the film and had a specialist in field recording capture the sounds she encountered there, the hums and buzzes and rhythmic clanking of the machinery. Then she processed those sounds and edited them as if they were instruments and made a grimly hypnotic anti-musical kind of music from them. For Joker, Guðnadóttir also worked unconventionally, composing the score from the shooting script rather than a rough cut of the film. She wrote the core themes on a halldorophone, an electro-acoustic instrument that is played much like a cello but facilitates the creative manipulation of feedback and other effects. Phillips, when shooting the film, would play Guðnadóttir’s music on the set, allowing the score to drive the action. With the background music foregrounded in the filmmaking, Guðnadóttir’s score is as elemental to Joker as Joaquin Phoenix’s performance. The music, a slow-acting poison formula of acoustic instruments and electronics mixed and overheated, brings to life the Joker’s degeneration into madness and bloodlust so vividly that you could watch the movie with your eyes closed and the vocals muted and still have the Joker experience. Reflecting on the darkness of the score in an interview, Guðnadóttir connected it to her work outside film, music that deserves to be more widely heard. “My solo music started as a way to really look inwards…without any outside dialogue,” she said. “A lot of my music is kind of contemplative, and somehow that always tends to tilt on the darker side. My inner conversation is apparently quite dark.”

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19 minutes ago, publicist said:

And here, ladies and gentlemen, you have it black on white why wasting your time on this (and probably other) awards is pure nonsense:

 

“Every time that ‘Joker’ ad comes on TV with that weird violin, I’m like, ‘Oh god, turn it off! Turn it off!’ But, I mean, come on, how many Oscars can John Williams and Randy Newman win? I know it’s so stupid to think like that but I’m sort of influenced by that. I might still vote for ‘Joker’ even though I can’t stand the score and haven’t seen the film because it’s the first time a woman would win.”

 

by Anonymous Oscar voter

Has this ejit completely forgotten about Rachel Portman, and Anne Dudley?!

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Of course. Because, you know, who cares?

 

Gee, what a piece of shit that Nation article is. It's ok to celebrate your own friends but not on such rotten tangent that likens all filmmusic B. H. (before Hildur) to Les Baxter bachelor pad LPs. I mean, seriously.

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23 minutes ago, publicist said:

“Every time that ‘Joker’ ad comes on TV with that weird violin, I’m like, ‘Oh god, turn it off! Turn it off!’ But, I mean, come on, how many Oscars can John Williams and Randy Newman win? I know it’s so stupid to think like that but I’m sort of influenced by that. I might still vote for ‘Joker’ even though I can’t stand the score and haven’t seen the film because it’s the first time a woman would win.”

 

 

There's so many wrong things with this, I can't even begin to imagine how moronic this people are. It's like they think "no one will know who I am anyway, so I can show the world my utter idiocy!"

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23 minutes ago, publicist said:

Of course. Because, you know, who cares?

 

Gee, what a piece of shit that Nation article is. It's ok to celebrate your own friends but not on such rotten tangent that likens all filmmusic B. H. (before Hildur) to Les Baxter bachelor pad LPs. I mean, seriously.

 

Sounds almost as bad as the "film music critic" guy who waxes Zimmer poetry over at Slate...

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Resuming the comment from the Oscar voter:

 

-I don't like the score;

 

-I haven't watched the movie, so I don't know how the score works on it, how the music supports the narrative, how it comments about the character, which is, like, the BASIC to give the most famous award in the American movie industry to a score;

 

-But, since the others are some old white dudes with lots of Oscars, I'll give the award to this score I DON'T like, just because the composer is female, and women, of course, never won anything on this industry outside of the Best Actress categories and maybe Best Costume Design.

 

Genius!

 

This person really have no problem on demoralizing his own job as a voter and the whole Academy... Days later, they get surprised learning that the ratings went down once again.

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10 minutes ago, Edmilson said:

This person really have no problem on demoralizing his own job as a voter and the whole Academy... Days later, they get surprised learning that the ratings went down once again.

 

Well, if anything, Hildur's inevitable would probably be good for ratings. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if many voters' choices lean towards what improves image and ratings of the Academy in the eyes of world.

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19 minutes ago, KK said:

 

Well, if anything, Hildur's inevitable would probably be good for ratings. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if many voters' choices lean towards what improves image and ratings of the Academy in the eyes of world.

The question we need to ask ourselves is whether it matters.

 

Karol

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I don't think specifically Hildur's victory will be good for ratings. Probably it'll be good for the image of the Academy being more ~diverse~ by giving the award for Best Original Score for a female composer, but for the ratings... not so much.

 

What may give them a little more audience is the presence of the billion dollar grossing blockbuster movie Joker on so many awards. When the academy was nominating just smaller flicks, the ratings went down, but last year with Black Panther and Bohemian Rhapsody, the ratings went up compared to the previous year.

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6 hours ago, Naïve Old Fart said:

Has this ejit completely forgotten about Rachel Portman, and Anne Dudley?!

 

Reminds me of the people who acted like BLACK PANTHER was the first movie to ever have... drumroll... black people, in it. All because people want to be able to pat themselves on the back like they're making huge strides of progress, when that progress has already been made. It's amazing, how short Hollywood's memory can be.

 

7 hours ago, publicist said:

And here, ladies and gentlemen, you have it black on white why wasting your time on this (and probably other) awards is pure nonsense:

 

“Every time that ‘Joker’ ad comes on TV with that weird violin, I’m like, ‘Oh god, turn it off! Turn it off!’ But, I mean, come on, how many Oscars can John Williams and Randy Newman win? I know it’s so stupid to think like that but I’m sort of influenced by that. I might still vote for ‘Joker’ even though I can’t stand the score and haven’t seen the film because it’s the first time a woman would win.”

 

by Anonymous Oscar voter

 

So the people who will hand her the Oscar can at least anonymously admit that they don't like her music, lol. If that isn't proof that it's all just a bunch of virtue-signaling these days, I don't know what is.

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5 hours ago, KK said:

 

Well, if anything, Hildur's inevitable would probably be good for ratings. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if many voters' choices lean towards what improves image and ratings of the Academy in the eyes of world.

 

Hollywood is basically all white guilt liberals. Wins like Crash and Green Book only make sense if you know that.

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On 2/4/2020 at 1:16 PM, Tydirium said:

It's kind of depressingly funny how Hildur is getting all these awards, and yet if you go over to the Filmtracks forums, the annual "Filmtracks Community Awards" (almost 100 film music fans voted) doesn't feature a single score by her in the top 30... So how are these big-name awards so out-of-touch? If the consensus among people who actively engage with film music as a hobby, is that her scores don't deserve to be a top 10 (let alone to snag the #1 spot), then why on Earth are these awards taken seriously? It's a joke.

Nah, it’s the film music message boards that are the joke. 
 

The Oscars have always been this way. Don’t know why everyone is acting surprised. Every year they do the anonymous voter confessions and every year it reveals that it’s all politics, like we all suspect and know. So... who cares?

 

Y’all have to step away and look at this from a wide perspective. These ceremonies are literally just a bunch of millionaires giving each other gold statues. If you are nominated, you get a gift bag worth $100,000. Stop putting it up on a pedestal because it’s rarely indicative of the actual quality of current film. 

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Has anyone considered that 1 or 2 anonymous voter interviews are not necessarily representative of the attitudes of every single Academy member?  These sites are in it for the clicks, so they would only publish ones that are likely to make people angry.  Anyway, being a film music nerd isn't a requirement for working in the film industry, why would you expect the wider industry to share your musical tastes?

 

I'm sure most members do what most everyone does when voting for anything: balance their personal preferences with their perceptions of the wider group dynamics, etc.

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And so it continues:

 

Best Original Score

 

This one was such a no-brainer. [Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker's] John Williams? Just a big yawn. [The Alexandre Desplat score for] Little Women was nothing special. Marriage Story? I've heard it a lot. 1917? Thomas Newman. Dynamic. Powerful. Drives the picture along really nice. But the Joker score [by Hildur Guðnadóttir] is fucking amazing. It was fresh. It was new. It was young. It was alive. It was scary. It was creepy. It made you get into his [Joker's] character. You know, oftentimes when I hear Q&As it makes me less interested in a movie, but I heard her on NPR doing an interview and I was fucking floored. And that TV series that she did [the HBO limited series Chernobyl] also has a fucking amazing score. But Joker has the freshest score in years.

 

MY VOTE Joker

https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/lists/brutally-honest-oscar-ballot-1917-gimmicky-renee-zellweger-nailed-it-1276607/item/best-original-score-2020-brutally-honest-ballot-2-1276611

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What a bunch of cunts. These retards can't recognize a good score even if it was dancing in front of them. Joker's score might be effective, but fresh? What is so innovative about that score? Really, what is? The first time a composer used a cello solo? Or the first score by a female composer whose name isn't Rachel Portman?

 

So, the pre requisite for winning this fucking award is just being "young and innovative"? I think I'll be a movie composer and make a score that is just the sound of myself farting and burping manipulated electronically. It'll be called "fresh, new, young, the best score since The Social Network". etc.

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3 minutes ago, Edmilson said:

I think I'll be a movie composer and make a score that is just the sound of myself farting and burping manipulated electronically. It'll be called "fresh, new, young, the best score since The Social Network". etc.

 

Didn't HanZ already do that?

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