INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY earned John Williams his 54th Oscar nomination.
Last week, John Williams celebrated his 92nd birthday, so it seems proper to shine a light on the legendary composer before the month ends. After all, in January, he also became the oldest person ever to secure an Oscar nomination, as he got into the Best Original Score lineup with Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. It was his 54th honor - he's won five Oscars as well - making him the most nominated living artist and runner-up for most nominated individual ever. That record is still held by Walt Disney, with 59.
In American Film History, there will never be a more iconic and influential composer than John Williams. If you don't believe it, join me as I go through his 54 nominations and offer my ranking…
If I load this article full of videos, I'm afraid the page will be slow as snails, if not entirely unresponsive. To avoid that fate, I'll only offer videos for the top ten. The remaining scores will have a link to the Spotify album if they have one. With no further ado, here we go.
49. THE BOOK THIEF (2013)
You can always count on John Williams to deliver a beautiful score, comforting in its sound and mechanisms. However, that approach can often result in derivative efforts, capitulations to sentimentalism so shameless they reach the point of self-parody. Out of all of the composer's Oscar-nominated scores, The Book Thief is the greatest sinner, guilty of all those vices. It's treacly slop, technically solid, but artistically bankrupt. Even so, I wouldn't blame anyone for finding something to love in the tracks. They are pretty to the ear, if nothing else.
48. TOM SAWYER (1973), shared with Richard M. & Robert B. Sherman
47. GOODBYE, MR. CHIPS (1969), shared with Leslie Bricusse
Back when the Oscars still had an Adapted or Original Song Score category, Williams was nominated for these two reworkings of classic stories. Both lack memorable numbers, even if Mr. Chips' musicality is more robust and exciting than Tom Sawyer's appeal to traditional Americana.
46. THE RIVER (1984)
It's hard to find much fault in Williams' sweet melodies for Mark Rydell's farm life drama. The issue comes in their usage within the film, often overbearing and incongruent with a soundscape that's always better when engaging with the sounds of nature. Some synch intrusions are also anomalous in Williams' oeuvre, and the composer isn't the best at blending them with the orchestra's grandeur.
45. SLEEPERS (1996)
The cry of wind instruments makes for an effective device, suggesting nostalgia and loneliness. However, it's often too saccharine for a Barry Levinson film trying to provide a sobering look at the long-lasting effects of abuse in the lives of brutalized boys grown into haunted men. Sometimes, it can feel like Williams defaults to a set of stylistic strategies with which he's comfortable, even if they're wrong for a project's unique demands.
44. LINCOLN (2012)
43. WAR HORSE (2011)
Both these late-career Williams-Spielberg collaborations recall the martial tenor the composer developed in his Oliver Stone movies in the late 80s and 90s. However, they err on the side of too much sweetness with too little bite. Lincoln's intent on approaching history as a realpolitik matter would benefit from a less effusive score. War Horse almost has the opposite problem, drunk on classicism yet lacking one of those instantly memorable John Williams cues to tie it all together.
42. THE TOWERING INFERNO (1974)
41. THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE (1972)
Here we have two rousing scores for iconic titles in that 1970s wave of all-star disaster flicks. They're at their best when opening and closing their narratives, rather generic as aural backdrop to the action scenes. Though it would feel unfair to penalize Williams for this, it should be noted that the soundtracks are inextricable from their Oscar-winning main themes, written by Joel Hirschhorn and Al Kasha.
40. SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (1998)
I've long thought that John Williams' über-sentimental and patriotic-sounding score is a major Achilles Heel to Spielberg's war picture. While I can't deny its power when experienced on its own, the music feels detrimental to the film proper when properly contextualized. It's a pity because tracks like "Hymn to the Fallen" and "Omaha Beach" are among Williams' most evocative efforts.
39. THE FABELMANS (2022)
Simple and solid work, it's especially effective when privileging the piano as its main instrument, suggesting maternal influence beyond the home. The principal motifs are lovely, with top marks for the plucking strings of "Mother and Son."
38. INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE (1989)
37. STAR WARS: EPISODE IX – THE RISE OF SKYWALKER (2019)
36. STAR WARS: EPISODE VIII – THE LAST JEDI (2017)
Because John Williams is responsible for so many franchises' iconic sound, one finds a lot of titles in his filmography where it seems like he's resting on laurels, replaying and remixing his greatest hits with slight variation. It's beautiful work, but it can often feel derivative. Then again, can one blame the composer for appealing to nostalgia when considering Indiana Jones' supposed last crusade or the closing chapters in the Skywalker Saga?
35. THE ACCIDENTAL TOURIST (1988)
34. THE WITCHES OF EASTWICK (1987)
These two back-to-back nominations find Williams working within divergent milieus. For The Witches of Eastwick, there's a taste for overwrought sensuality before it all explodes into some sinister strings, escalating to a carnivalesque spectacle. It's a lot of fun but spiky enough to sell the plot's satanic perversions. The Accidental Tourist is much more mournful, yet it still delivers every emotional beat like a punch to the solar plexus. I prefer the comedy to the drama, but they both feel representative of this phase in the composer's career.
33. THE PATRIOT (2000)
The militaristic energy of his Stone collaborations finds Williams' taste for robust orchestration and a sentimental twist – the perfect combination for a rousing score laced with revolutionary nostalgia. It's no wonder the soundtrack has lived on beyond its movie origins, having been famously played as background music for Barack Obama's victory speech in 2008.
32. THE REIVERS (1969)
An early work that features John Williams' predilection for traditional Americana. There's much to love about the transition of modest harmonica to the full breadth of a classic film orchestra, as prone to romantic melancholia as to an explosion of the banjo. Historically, it's a score of great importance because it made a young Steven Spielberg want to work with Williams.
31. HOME ALONE (1990)
A frothy Christmas confection, pitched to invoke childhood whimsy and some nasty trickster tone when the home invasion set piece manifests. Because this is always on TV during the holidays, the tunes have been burnt into my mind. Sure, it's sugary sweet to the point of tooth rot, but it's so recognizable it deserves recognition.
30. CINDERELLA LIBERTY (1973)
One of John Williams' most underrated scores, this jazzy marvel found him composing for both romance and despondency, honing on the sonic properties of loneliness and the soul's need for company. The love theme is yearning manifest as music, a plea that gets answered in the bittersweet songs.
29. ANGELA'S ASHES (1999)
Again, a Williams score is almost too beautiful for the film encompassing it. And yet, the tracks' warmth often serves as a counterpoint, positing the memoirist picture as someone's remembrance above present action. Even if misery dominates the screen, it's being experienced through the prism of a man retelling his childhood to the audience.
28. INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM (1984)
27. INDIANA JONES AND THE DIAL OF DESTINY (2023)
More than the first Indiana Jones picture, The Temple of Doom is in dialogue with the adventure flicks of the 1930s that inspired Spielberg. Stabs at Orientalism may be problematic, but they allow Williams to stretch his muscles and musical idioms. And yet, my favorite Indiana Jones sequel soundtrack is last year's Dial of Destiny. "Helena's Theme" is one of the composer's best late-career tracks.
26. SABRINA (1995)
The oft-forgotten remake of Billy Wilder's classic is justly dismissed as a piece of cinema. However, its score is a wonder worth remembering, stylish and sophisticated in a way no other aspect of the movie is. It's an elegant enchantment that beckons the audience to fall in love with love.
25. MUNICH (2005)
Considering the vastness of his career, it's curious how sparingly Williams has used the sound of human voice as part of his compositions. In Munich, however, the choral passages speak of a tragedy beyond the text and picture, some primordial lamentation that hollows out the story's ultimate triumph. With his music, the composer undercuts and excoriates. He reveals the film's pyrrhic victory.
24. BORN ON THE FOURTH OF JULY (1989)
23. JFK (1991)
22. NIXON (1995)
The culmination of Williams' penchant for martial melodies, growing more complex and daring with each new Oliver Stone film. In '89, it was a hero's journey vivisected. In '91, a sense of grandeur falling in and out of a sorrowful piano riff. In '95, it's the transition of filmic Mannerism into Baroque, excess in titanic terms, a great beast roaring and dying in one breath.
21. STAR WARS: EPISODE VI – THE RETURN OF THE JEDI (1983)
20. STAR WARS: EPISODE VII – THE FORCE AWAKENS (2015)
The Return of the Jedi has some unfortunate musical tangents, but the Emperor's ominous, nearly atonal theme is a fantastic addition to the Star Wars canon. Furthermore, the big battle is an all-around marvel, weaving the various storylines and their individual themes into a cohesive set piece. Nevertheless, the simplicity of "Rey's Theme" and its variations makes me rank The Force Awakens above the original trilogy's finale.
19. EMPIRE OF THE SUN (1987)
This one has the least classically romantic score of all Spielberg-Williams collaborations. The music is built around a Welsh lullaby instead of some original central theme, growing in complexity as it goes along without ever swelling into golden heroism. Everything is appropriately somber for this war narrative, the ghost of Williams' sentimental tendencies making the movie sound like a child's spirit breaking itself apart, into bruised adulthood.
18. THE ADVENTURES OF TINTIN (2011)
Even more than his compositions for Temple of Doom, John Williams' Adventures of Tintin score is a swirl of pastiche, pulling from adventure flicks of yore until a new sound emerges, old and new at the same time. Playful, even impish, it enjoys an air of European jauntiness that makes it stand out.
17. A.I. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (2001)
Re-imagining Pinocchio for a nightmarish tomorrow, Williams invokes a movie-length lullaby lost between the brutality of man and robot, the faraway promises of a mother that echo like lies in the abyss. One of the composer's most atypical works, it feels like what he'd have constructed for Kubrick's original vision rather than what one would expect from a Spielbergian fantasia.
16. AMISTAD (1997)
Truth be told, this score ranks so high because its main theme is one of Williams' most rousing and emotionally eruptive pieces. Adapted from the words in a Bernard Binlin Dadié poem, "Dry Your Tears, Afrika" is the perfect bookend for Amistad, equal parts lament and cry of freedom. It's a song of liberation that starts in hums before Mende verses summon a ray of choral hope, breaking through like sunshine after a storm.
15. MEMOIRS OF A GEISHA (2005)
Thankfully, Williams didn't conceive this score as Japanese pastiche, moving away from the Orientalism of past efforts. That said, he does use a fair share of instruments from Japan, forcibly transforming his robust orchestrations into something familiar yet distant, beautiful beyond belief. At many points, it feels like Williams' music, more than the direction, the text, or even the cutting, is the force that dictates the narrative's move forward.
14. CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977)
Spielberg's ability to invoke childhood wonder wouldn't be the same without Williams' collaboration. Close Encounters of the Third Kind is proof of that, summoning that besotting feeling while suggesting that which lies beyond human understanding. The emotions are viscerally understood, even when the sounds imply an alien mystery.
13. VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (1967)
A camp dream, this movie and its soundtrack are twinned wonder. They twinkle with the sparkle of costume jewelry, beaded gowns, and click-clacking high heels. It's ripe on the threshold of rot, dancing on the edge of oblivion, so pretty it sounds wrong. Williams gets the melodrama, he gets the Broadway jest, he gets the lustiness, and he may even get the absurdity. Regardless, his work is pitch-perfect.
12. FIDDLER ON THE ROOF (1971)
Lightyears away from Williams' other Adapted Score nominations, Fiddler on the Roof represents a synergetic relationship between picture and composer, each driving the other to epic grandeur. Logically, much of it comes from the original play, but the film reaches for a scale much greater than the stage could allow. Curiously, unlike many of Williams' scores, this creation never adopts the form of an emotional crescendo. Instead, it starts in the stars and comes crashing down to earth, a bright flame slowly fading until all you have are glowing embers.
11. IMAGES (1972)
A nervy disruption in Williams' usual styles, this Robert Altman drama dives into a woman's psychosis, her mirrored selves and anxious unrealities. To better represent this dissonance, the Oscar-winning composer collaborated with Stomu Yamashta, a Japanese genius whose contribution was sadly unrewarded by the Academy. Still, even as the nomination doesn't represent the two sounds, their unstable danse macabre makes Images a sonic showstopper.
10. SCHINDLER'S LIST (1993)
I've long thought that the violin sounds like weeping. I wonder if that impression came to be before or after I first saw Schindler's List and experienced Itzhak Perlman's plaintive contributions to Williams' score. Either way, it's an incredible achievement of raw emotion articulated through music, given order, and a chance of deliverance History itself can't possess.
09. CATCH ME IF YOU CAN (2002)
You can't beat this movie's title sequence. And though the animation is eye-catching, nothing comes close to the ebullience invoked by the music moving along with the images. It's as if the protagonist's conman ways were translated into the score, sublimated in its playfulness. You can practically hear the music winking at the audience.
08. HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER'S STONE (2001)
The first Harry Potter film is the genesis of its most long-lasting musical motifs, tunes that are as magical as the world portrayed herein. "Hedwig's Theme" is especially memorable, one of Williams' most unforgettable creations from start to finish, wondrous wizardry given orchestral form.
07. HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN (2004)
More complex and inventive than the score for the first film, The Prisoner of Azkaban features some of the most varied cues in Williams' career, not to mention this franchise's history. From spooky songs derived from Shakespearean verses to the amorphous wail of the Patronus charm, going through the heroic propulsion of flight and the mischievous grotesque.
06. SUPERMAN (1978)
Iconic is the word to describe this Williams score, starting with a main theme that feels like the Platonic ideal for every superhero movie that followed. The romantic passages are just as remarkable as the action sequences, but the marching forward motion is what stays in the viewer's memory long after the credits roll reaches its end.
05. STAR WARS: EPISODE V – THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK (1980)
Speaking of marches, don't you love the fascistic oomph of the "Imperial March" that serves as Darth Vader's theme? It's the ultimate synthetization of tyrannical order, intent on spreading its regime across the universe, evil incarnate as a melody. It's a testament to the score's perfection that there are other compositions of comparable quality. Think of the love theme that sparks between Han and Leia. Or the phantasmagoria of the "Yoda Theme," how it evolves from the force while lightening its more portentous tones.
04. JAWS (1975)
If ever a film composer better summarized the innate sense of menace in a score, I don't know them. Sure, Williams is riffing on Bernard Herrmann's Psycho music, but there's something uniquely Jaws about the shark's ominous theme. The beast's predation is a primordial force stabbing our ears, a divine conductor taking over the viewer's heartbeat. Experiencing the track in its proper context is like being possessed, and listening to the adventuring cues in between is to feel a breath of hope, a feeling that, despite staring directly into death's blood-red void, everything will be alright.
03. RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK (1981)
This is the adventure movie score to end all adventure movie scores. Indeed, the music is so perfectly tied to the action that you could erase all the dialogue, depending only on music and imagery as your guides, and still understand the story. Not only that, all the emotions are there, clear but not necessarily prescriptive, seducing you into them rather than blasting the audience into submission. It's unbelievably perfect. So much so that I might put this as my number one if you asked me another day. But of course, I could say the same for most of this top ten.
02. E.T. THE EXTRA-TERRESTRIAL (1982)
More than most of the scores in the long Spielberg-Williams collaboration, this one dictated the shape and structure of the final work rather than adapting its melodies to it. Indeed, the sci-fi fable is another picture where you could experience the fullness of its magic even without any spoken dialogue. The symphonies singing over the moving image are enough. This music often feels like the maximum expression of Steven Spielberg's cinema, his vices, and miracles wrapped up in a virtuosic piece that demands a standing ovation. The last act, in particular, offers tunes that are lightning bolts connected to the spectator's very soul, electrifying them to the core and prompting genuine tears. A lot of Williams' music is meant to make you cry, but none does it better than the E.T. score.
01. STAR WARS (1977)
Inspired by Wagnerian tradition, John Williams helped make Star Wars a space opera of such musicality one can't even begin to imagine the saga without its tuneful backbone. Using themes like leitmotiv to delineate emotional through lines and individual characters' journeys, it's fair to say that this score revolutionized the way movie music was created. I'm not bold enough to say John Williams brought Wagner's ideas to cinema in an unprecedented gesture, but he undoubtedly helped popularize the approach. But innovation can sometimes be rough and imperfect, like the fawn trying to take its first steps into the world. Williams' work, however, is unimprovable from the get-go, opening a window into the beyond and letting us experience the purest cinematic fantasy through our ears.
I could stop here since instrumental scores are what people most associate with John Williams. However, researching this piece, I forced myself to watch Yes, Giorgio. Such horror demands a result, a reason to justify it, so here goes a ranking of the five tunes for which John Williams was nominated for the Best Original Song Oscar.
05. "When You're Alone" from HOOK (1990), shared with Leslie Bricusse
So syrupy it might induce stomach aches, like those you got as a kid when you ate too much candy. It's nothing special, and the soundtrack would probably be improved if you excised Bricusse's puerile contribution from it.
04. "If I Were In Love" from YES, GIORGIO (1982), shared with Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman
Yes, Giorgio is probably one of the worst films ever nominated for an Oscar. Next to it, even Cimarron starts to look awards-worthy. Because of it, I can't help but resent the song even as I appreciate its usage in the film. "If We Were In Love" foregrounds Pavarotti's voice in a sequence mostly made of landscape shots. For a moment, one almost forgets about the shoddy romance that's waiting once the soaring sequence gets down to earth.
03. "Moonlight" from SABRINA (1995), shared with Alan Bergman and Marilyn Bergman
An inoffensive mellow melody, sung by Sting with dispassionate smoothness – this isn't to the level of the film's instrumental score. And yet, it makes for a nice piece of background noise.
02. "Somewhere in My Memory" from HOME ALONE (1990), shared with Leslie Bricusse
Home Alone works best as a trickster narrative, alternatively cutting to sentimental comedy that feels more accomplished than it is, thanks to Catherine O'Hara's performance. So, I remain unconvinced by its stabs at Christmas morality and weepiness, most strongly embodied in this song. Still, it's a fine holiday tune, pretty and armless, good for wintertime playlists.
01. "Nice to Be Around" from CINDERELLA LIBERTY (1973), shared with Paul Williams
The rare collaboration between John Williams and Paul Williams (unrelated) resulted in the former's only real contender for Best Original Song. And even then, there was no way it could beat "The Way We Were." Beyond the Oscar race, the tune strikes a strong impression of amorous disappointment, giving way to a new bloom of romance. It's one of the few times the composer's music felt attuned to the realities of unvarnished adult love stories.
After this exhaustive exercise, what say you, dear reader? What are your top ten John Williams Oscar nominations?