Oscar music noms a crowded field
ONE WORK is a master’s continuation of a multipart saga, interweaving leitmotifs with sophistication. One is an experimental foray along the tightrope between music and pure sound, blending acoustic instruments and electronic effects to create a steady ratcheting up of tension. One is a lush throwback to a bygone era, with a 60-piece orchestra.
I’m talking, of course, about the Best Original Score nominations for the 2018 Academy Awards.
The field is particularly strong. Jonny Greenwood, the Radiohead guitarist who as composer has become something of an indie-classical phenomenon, got his first Oscar nomination for his fourth collaboration with Paul Thomas Anderson: his rich score for “Phantom Thread.” The prolific Carter Burwell, previously nominated for “Carol,” is nominated for “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri,” a film that shares some of the ethos of his frequent collaborators the Coen brothers, and that he gave a dark, sardonic score. And Alexandre Desplat, a previous winner for “Grand Budapest Hotel” with seven additional past nominations, has been nominated for the liquid music he wrote for Guillermo del Toro’s fairy tale, “The Shape of Water.”
Then there are the two leading lions. Hans Zimmer has won a single Academy Award, for the score for “The Lion King,” and been nominated for 10 others; his score for “Dunkirk” is based on two elements, the sound of a ticking watch (recorded from a watch belonging to the director, Christopher Nolan) and the “Shepard tone,” an auditory illusion that superimposes individual ascending tracks to make it sound as though the music is rising to infinity. (Vox describes it as “a barber pole of sound, seeming to rise without actually going anywhere.”)
But can anyone beat John Williams? He has won five Academy Awards, been nominated 51 times, and the music he composed for the first movie to appear in the “Star Wars” franchise has been called the greatest movie score of all time. “The Last Jedi,” his eighth symphonic score for the series, has been acclaimed as one of the best yet, showing the 85-year-old at the top of his form, working in themes that have become iconographic for a couple of generations of filmgoers. (My six-year-old constantly demands “The Imperial March” from the first soundtrack, and noted the similarities when I once juxtaposed it with “The Dance of the Knights” from Prokofiev’s “Romeo and Juliet.”)
Soundtrack aficionados will note that Michael Giacchino — who broke into the “Star Wars” franchise himself with the score for “Rogue One” — was passed over for “Coco,” although that film’s “Remember Me” was nominated for Best Original Song.
Film scores continue to occupy an oddly tentative place in the mainstream classical music field — increasingly present on pops concerts, yet cordoned off as something sui generis, despite the fact that it represents more of a direct continuation of classical tradition in many ways than contemporary concert music, as well as serving as a gateway drug to the many, many people for whom they are the introduction to the sound of an orchestra.
I plead guilty myself to tuttutting about Williams’ part in Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration, when Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman approached him for help in figuring out what they could play after the president asked them both to perform and said he liked Copland, a composer who didn’t write any duo works for violin and cello. Few contemporary composers can turn around works on short notice; but Williams is able to write fast and skilfully, increasingly richly, to measure — and on a deadline.
And many, many people love his music — people who might not otherwise think of setting foot in a concert hall. At a time when the conventional wisdom is that audiences don’t like new music, people are passionately interested in the music written for movies — written, often enough, by composers who have also written concert music, such as Greenwood. As for Williams: He is increasingly acknowledged as a true master, written up in publications such as the New Yorker as an heir to Wagner’s tradition. And he hasn’t won an Oscar since 1994. I hope he gets this one. — WP-Bloomberg