Ready, Freddie, go! The race for an Oscar has begun

FROM Hollywood blockbusters to rock and rap, film soundtracks are vying for attention as the awards season hots up. Mail music critic Adrian Thrills rounds up the best...

A STAR IS BORN (Interscope) 4/5

LADY Gaga and Bradley Cooper brought real emotional heft to the songs they wrote for A Star Is Born. The upshot was a memorable soundtrack that is fuelling the ongoing renaissance of a genre already boosted by the huge sales of last year’s The Greatest Showman.

Gaga impressively channels her inner Streisand on power ballads such as Always Remember Us This Way. Cooper, sounding like Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, has a fine country-rock voice.

Their duet Shallow, victorious in the best original song category at the Golden Globes, is an Oscar contender, too.

MAMMA MIA! HERE WE GO AGAIN (Polydor) 4/5

THIS feel-good ABBA homage was among the best-selling albums of last year in Ireland, and it’s easy to see why.

Overseen by ABBA’s Benny Andersson and sung by the cast, the sequel to 2008’s Mamma Mia! reiterates the magic, and the melancholy, of some of pop’s greatest songs.

Actress Lily James showed vocal poise on The Name Of The Game, while Cher’s powerhouse version of Fernando paved the way for her own ABBA tribute album Dancing Queen.

BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY (Virgin EMI) 5/5

GREATEST hits and live snippets dominate a celebration of Queen that works both as a soundtrack and as a stand-alone album.

We Will Rock You moves awkwardly between studio and live takes, but the vintage stage versions of Now I’m Here and Keep Yourself Alive are dazzling.

Pride of place, though, goes to Queen’s show-stealing performance at Live Aid. Released in audio form for the first time, it features Radio Ga Ga and Freddie Mercury’s crowd-pleasing brilliance.

Out now on CD, it’s available on vinyl from February 8.

BLACKKKLANSMAN (Back Lot Music) 4/5

MUSIC has often been essential to Spike Lee’s films – with 1989’s Do The Right Thing an early example – and this tale of AfricanAmerican cop Ron Stallworth, who infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in the late Seventies, is no exception.

With guitar motifs that pay homage to Isaac Hayes and Jimi Hendrix, jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s orchestral score, available digitally, is superb.

Greg Lake’s Lucky Man and classic southern soul number Too Late To Turn Back Now are among the Seventies hits also featured in the film. ALEXANDRE DESPLAT won an Oscar last year for The Shape Of Water, and the French composer is in the running again with his ambitious music for Wes Anderson’s animated tale of wild dogs marooned off the Japanese coast.

His score is a mongrel effort, with strings and woodwind jostling with taiko drums. In a nod to tradition, the soundtrack features a theme from the 1954 movie classic Seven Samurai.

There’s also the wonderful I Won’t Hurt You, by psychedelic rockers The West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band.

READY PLAYER ONE (Decca) 4/5

STEVEN Spielberg’s sci-fi epic is well served by Alan Silvestri’s rich, dramatic score augmented by a second album stuffed with so many classics from the late Seventies and Eighties that it is probably best listened to on a Sony Walkman while wearing shoulder pads.

Among the hits are Prince’s I Wanna Be Your Lover, New Order’s Blue Monday and Springsteen’s rollicking Chuck Berry pastiche Stand On It.

THE BALLAD OF BUSTER SCRUGGS (Milan) 3/5

THE Coen Brothers’ six-part Western is a beneficiary of a new Oscars rule for film scores (and songs) that involves a preliminary shortlist before final nominations are announced on January 22.

Carter Burwell’s instrumental score – which combines folk motifs, bar-room piano and strings – is a justifiable inclusion. It’s spiced with new songs, too, with the best featuring actor Tim Blake Nelson. Having learnt guitar for the role of singing cowboy Scruggs, he shines on some twangy hoe-downs and ballads.

MARY POPPINS RETURNS (UMC) 3/5

Movie magic, clockwise from top left: A Star Is Born, First Man, Blackkklansman, The Ballad Of Buster Scruggs and, centre, Bohemian Rhapsody. Inset below: Black Panther MARC SHAIMAN and Scott Whitman’s Mary Poppins music is neither practically perfect nor something quite atrocious. A throwback to the golden age of Hollywood musicals, it lies somewhere in between.

Then again, the 1964 original did set a high bar. US singer and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda struggles to convince as a Cockney on (Underneath The) Lovely London Sky, but Trip A Little Light Fantastic and ballad The Place Where Lost Things Go are deservedly in the running for an Oscar.

FIRST MAN (Back Lot Music) 4/5

HAVING supplied the music for Damien Chazelle’s previous film La La Land, Justin Hurwitz takes another giant leap with his score for the story surrounding Neil Armstrong’s 1969 moonwalk.

To echo the low-budget sci-fi films of the Fifties, Hurwitz learnt to play the theremin. The vintage electronic instrument features alongside his melodic yet anthemic orchestrations plus Leon Bridges’s cover of Gil Scott-Heron’s rap poem Whitey On The Moon. Triumphant at the Golden Globes, this score is set for more awards.

SUSPIRIA (XL) 3/5

RADIOHEAD guitarist Jonny Greenwood made a seamless move from alternative rock into film sounds (he was Oscar-nominated for Phantom Thread). Now singer Thom Yorke is following suit with his music for Luca Guadagnino’s horror remake Suspiria.

Inspired by Vangelis’s 1982 Blade Runner soundtrack, his piano and synth score is hypnotic but repetitive. Its best moments are its traditional songs, with Suspirium a Radiohead-like ballad, and Yorke’s son Noah playing drums on Has Ended.

BLACK PANTHER (Interscope) 5/5

SALUTING Marvel Comics’ first black superhero, the Black Panther soundtrack is another epic two-parter. The score, by Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson, fuses traditional African music and symphonic sounds. There’s also an album of new songs created by innovative rapper Kendrick Lamar. UK singer Jorja Smith appears with Lamar on the languid I Am. All The Stars, starring Solana Rowe (aka SZA), should rival Shallow as best original song at the Oscars.

THE FAVOURITE (Decca) 4/5

THE Favourite’s tale of regal shenanigans in the 18th-century court of Queen Anne comes with playful baroque chamber music by Bach, Handel, Vivaldi and Purcell, plus instrumentals by electronic composer Anna Meredith. Out digitally now, and on CD on January 25, the Golden Globes success of Olivia Colman as the queen will boost its prospects. An intriguing oddity is a 1969 version of Elton John’s superb Skyline Pigeon. Elton later re-recorded the song on piano, but this early harpsichord take is a perfect period piece.