by Marisa Mecke

On Sunday, April 25, five exciting and innovative film scores will go head to head for Best Original Score at the 93rd Academy Awards ceremony. Ranging in style and sound, the nominees up for the Oscar are Soul, Mank, Minari, News of the World, and Da 5 Bloods.

Soul

Composers: Jon Batiste, Atticus Ross, and Trent Reznor

Pixar’s Soul, a frontrunner in this year’s Best Original Score category, swept the world in 2020 with beautiful animation, heartfelt storytelling, and music at its core. Jamie Foxx stars as Joe, a middle school band teacher on the verge of his big break as a jazz musician. When Joe’s soul is accidentally transported outside of his body, he must find his way back to life on earth – and rediscover what truly matters to him. 

The film required two separate musical sounds to capture its distinct worlds: New York City and the “ethereal cosmic realms of The Great Before.” To achieve this, frequent collaborators (and Nine Inch Nails bandmates) Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross teamed up with the acclaimed jazz and R&B musician Jon Batiste. A pianist and composer, Batiste hails from a New Orleans dynasty of jazz musicians who have helped to shape the city’s distinctive music scene. Batiste composed the film’s jazz sequences, while Reznor and Ross scored the new-age landscape that emerges as the protagonist, Joe, crosses into an alternate world.

Reznor and Ross have earned not one, but two nominations this year for Soul and Mank. Previously, the duo has won one Oscar together for their work on The Social Network (2010). Spanning cinematic genres, Reznor and Ross have also crafted scores for blockbuster hits such as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), Gone Girl (2014), Bird Box (2018), and documentaries such as Before the Flood (2016). 

Mank

Composers: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

Reznor and Ross’s second nominated score accompanies the dramedy Mank, which follows alcoholic social critic and screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz as he completes the screenplay of Citizen Kane (1941) for Orson Welles. In homage to the films of the 1930s and 40s, the biographical picture was shot entirely in black and white.

Though Reznor and Ross usually favor industrial, electronic sounds, the duo created a dark, lush soundscape for the old Hollywood backdrop in Mank using only instruments authentic to the 1940s, incorporating the brass tones and swing tempos popular during the time period to set the scene.

Minari

Composer: Emile Mosseri

Minari (meaning “water celery”) is a semi-autobiographical film based on the childhood of writer and director Lee Isaac Chung. Depicting a Korean family who start a farm in rural Arkansas during the 1980s, the film illustrates the family dynamics between children, parents, and grandparents as they adapt to their lives in a new country. 

Composer, pianist, and singer Emile Mosseri created a rich, ethereal score for Minari that required a full 40-piece string orchestra. Before writing the screenplay, Chung presented Mosseri with 80 snapshots of childhood memories, which served as inspiration for the sweet, sweeping melodies Mosseri utilizes throughout the film. While Mosseri has scored for films such as The Last Black Man in San Francisco (2019) and Kajillionaire (2020), Minari is his first Academy Award nomination. 

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News of the World

Composer: James Newton Howard

A veteran of cinematic scoring, composer, conductor, and record producer James Newton Howard has scored over 100 films and has received nominations for Academy Awards, Emmy Awards, and GRAMMY Awards. This year, Howard is nominated for his work on the film News of the World, starring Tom Hanks as Civil War veteran Jefferson Kyle Kidd. Kidd is charged with delivering a young girl (who had been taken by the Kiowa people years before) to her aunt and uncle against her will. 

Howard contributes an engaging soundtrack with a southern twang to the Western drama, chronicling the pair’s travels and trials together across the plains of Texas. Howard has scored for blockbuster films such as The Dark Knight (2008) and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) and most recently won awards for his contributions to the 2008 movie Defiance. 

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Da 5 Bloods

Composer: Terence Blanchard

Trumpeter, composer, and multi-decade Spike Lee collaborator Terence Blanchard’s Best Original Score nomination for Da 5 Bloods follows his first Oscar nod for the hit film BlacKkKlansman (2018). Da 5 Bloods tells the story of four Black Vietnam War veterans, who return to Vietnam seek the remains of their fallen squad leader and the gold fortune he helped them hide. 

Blanchard has composed the scores for over 40 films and recorded for more than 50, winning five GRAMMY Awards from 14 past nominations. Blanchard’s sweeping score to Da 5 Bloods avoids synthetic instruments, opting for wide orchestral suites and smaller instrumental ensembles. Director Spike Lee chose to highlight Marvin Gaye’s music in the film’s soundtrack, a decision which Blanchard explains shaped the score:  

“It automatically just sent me down a direction, musically, where I wanted the score to have a grand feel to it… I knew that Gaye’s music was going to cover a certain aspect of the emotion of dealing with social injustice in this country.”

(Grammy.com)

Whether or not Blanchard wins the Oscar, he has another exciting development on the horizon: Blanchard’s opera Fire Shut Up in My Bones will debut in the 2021-2022 Metropolitan Opera season, the first opera by a Black composer staged by the Met in its 136-year history.

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Sources and Further Reading:

Oscars Predictions: Best Original Score – Will Reznor and Ross’ Double Noms Cancel Each Other Out? (Variety)

‘Da 5 Bloods’ Composer on Spike Lee’s Vision, Marvin Gaye’s Message and Hollywood’s POC Blindspot (Variety)

Terence Blanchard: About

Emile Mosseri- Minari (Sacred Bones Records)

Trent Reznor (All Music)

Atticus Ross (All Music)

Mank on Netflix: who wrote the music and can you buy the soundtrack? (BBC Music Magazine)

Oscar-Nominated ‘Minari’ Composer Credits This Tim Burton Movie as Inspiration (The Wrap)

Terence Blanchard On The Music Behind ‘Da 5 Bloods,’ Working With Spike Lee And The Lasting Impact Of Marvin Gaye (Grammy.com)

By Ross Hickman

Here’s some perspective on this year’s standout set of Academy Award nominees for Best Original Score:

BlacKkKlansman

Set in the 1970s, BlacKkKlansman is an urgent, convoluted tale of two police officers infiltrating the Ku Klux Klan. The stakes couldn’t be higher, the situations more dire: the tangibility of white racial violence is acute in BlacKkKlansman, and the score brings out this palpable reality.

Terence Blanchard, the composer of the film’s score, channels the musical predilections of the ‘70s with tantalizing flights of electric guitar. Against the largely orchestral backdrop of the score, these departures – whether the jolts of the electric guitar or the war-like cascade of drums – signal moments of resolve and the panics of crisis. The score has an unmistakably epic quality; it evokes a sense of an unperturbed, righteous purpose underneath rare moments of levity.

Indeed, the score offers only glimpses of the humor that the film’s dialogue provokes. Perhaps this is a subliminal message of the score: the gravity of curbing violence lurks underneath humor.

Black Panther

The score for Black Panther finds its origins in various traditions of African music. As Ludwig Goransson conducted research for his score, he traveled to Senegal and South Africa, studying the work of both contemporary and past musicians.

The notion of a score for a superhero film with primarily African influences was entirely novel – something Goransson did not take lightly. Goransson’s compositions are meant to speak in ways that ordinary music doesn’t.

In the course of his research, Goransson found that music – in, for example, the ‘talking drums’ of several Senegalese artists – is a substantial mode of non-verbal communication for the African artists he encountered. The ‘talking drum,’ according to Goransson, was the focal point in developing a vision for Black Panther’s score.

The incorporation of musical communication as the central theme of the score is a remarkable contribution to the multi-faceted cultural encounter that is Black Panther.

If Beale Street Could Talk

Nicholas Britell, the composer of the score for the 2016 film Moonlight, returns with his second major score for the film adaptation of James Baldwin’s novel If Beale Street Could Talk.

The novel, and its film adaptation, follow a young black couple’s love story, through multifarious trials of family disputes and criminal accusations.

Britell’s compositions for If Beale Street Could Talk are nothing less than devastating. Trumpets mark the sunrise that is burgeoning love; the piano beats like an erratic heart; and the strings tie the film’s vehement emotions together – a conflicting, exquisite tapestry of love despite circumstance.

As Britell discussed in an interview for The Atlantic magazine, the decision to include string instruments was pivotal; they provide the emotional depth requisite in conveying the breadth of Baldwin’s novel. It is hard to imagine the score without those straining, stretching strings that suffuse the space between the thrills of love and the pangs of injustice.

Isle of Dogs

Renowned composer Alexandre Desplat wrote the score for Isle of Dogs, a characteristically odd addition to Wes Anderson’s canon of films. At first glance, and first sound, Isle of Dogs doesn’t have a clearly recognizable score.

Desplat’s compositions could be mistaken for mere sound effects: thumps, bells, sharp clacking sounds, and deep chanting pervade the score. The sounds and instruments are so disparate that the whole thing might be chalked up to repeating layers of furious nonsense – think a technologically updated Ravel’s Boléro, perhaps.

Unlike Ravel, there is no breathtaking culmination in Desplat’s score; it shifts back and forth between sounds like a kind of musical algorithm gone wild. Wild or not, the ceaseless beating and banging and clanging drive the film forward, absurdity in tow.

All in all, Desplat’s score matches well with Anderson’s cinematic style: endlessly weird and hopelessly intriguing.

Mary Poppins Returns

There are some classics that can’t be approached without quivering. At the intersection of musical theatre and film, there are such monumental encounters as My Fair Lady and Mary Poppins, both of which have endured newfound renditions in the past year. Beyond immortalized figures like Audrey Hepburn’s fussily enigmatic Eliza and Julie Andrew’s delightfully narcissistic Mary, the recordings of the films’ (and musicals’) scores have, in time, fallen out of step. The grainy magic of recordings from the mid-century has given way to perfectly polished – if not jealously affected – products of modern technological clarity.

The lyrics themselves play along nicely with the Sherman brothers’ 1964 Mary Poppins. And perhaps it’s an egregious musical fallacy to look back to Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke when considering the far more inclusive and inventive work of Mary Poppins Returns.

Though some of the alluring quirkiness of “Jolly Holiday” is lost on modern audiences, the caprice of childhood and the miracle of a stranger’s kindness still reverberate in Marc Shaiman’s compositions and the voices of Emily Blunt and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Where Julie Andrews was perhaps a bit dry and a tad formal, Emily Blunt is keenly expressive – with a more varied set of music to work with. Where Dick Van Dyke was charmingly odd, Lin-Manuel Miranda gives his Jack, an ‘apprentice’ of Bert, a more pensive, dignified outlook underpinning an ever-jovial disposition.

The old music may hold its own magic, but Mary Poppins Returns will surely take on its own luster in time.

Want more Oscars? Tune in February 22 at 8 p.m. for a brand new Reel Music from host Matt Rogers, featuring interviews with some of this year’s composer nominees!

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Ross Hickman is a first-year student at Davidson College, who’s deeply interested in film music and works at WDAV.