Listening to the Best Score Nominees

18 days til Oscar so today is a perfect day to look at and listen to the composers nominated for Best Original Score. They have 18 nominations between them and on their Oscar chart, you can vote on who you think should win. Let's check out the nominees!

Terence Blanchard  for BlacKkKlansman  (56 years old | 33 features | 1st nomination!)
This New Orleans native is world-famous jazz musician and trumpet player. He's been working with Spike Lee in on capacity or another since Spike's second film School Daze (1988). His first full score for Spike was Jungle Fever (1991) and Blanchard has scored all but a couple of Lee's joints since...

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Cynthia Erivo as Harriet and the *next* Best Actress Race

That was quick. There are only four spots left in the next Best Actress Oscar race.

We kid, we kid. Academy Award nomination races aren't sewn up half as quickly as the internet always pretends they are. Nevertheless it's hard to deny that on paper Cynthia Erivo playing Harriett Tubman (there's your first still above) reads just right for major Oscar attention.

There are so many ways in which this seems likely without seeing a single clip. Let us count them...

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10th Anniversary: Laika's "Coraline"

by Timothy Brayton

Coraline, which opened in theaters ten years ago today, was groundbreaking in all sorts of ways. It was the first feature made by Laika, soon to become a cultishly loved, critically praised animation studio with an Oscar nomination for every one of its four films (a fifth, Missing Link, is set to open in April). It was one of the first films in the most recent 3D fad to demonstrate a real sense of the emotional and narrative possibilities of using stereoscopic effects, and it was only rarely equaled in the years following. It represents an extraordinary leap into a brand new mixed-media animation style that I refrain from calling "revolutionary" only because nobody else but Laika seems to be interested in experimenting with it.

The truly special thing about Coraline is not that it achieved any of these things. Plenty of films invent new stuff. What's special – downright miraculous, even – is that Coraline feels just as fresh and bold in 2019 as it did in 2009...

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Soundtracking: Cold War

by Chris Feil

Pawel Pawlikowski’s Cold War serves us romance as allegory, a love story that represents a falling out with and tidal pull towards national identity. The film’s lovers, Zuzanna and Wiktor, meet in rural post-war Poland, beginning an affair that spans years and countries, their inevitable frustrated split and reuniting not unlike a national identity continually struggling to redefine itself. But crucially, Pawlikowski positions them in a musical world, one where genres and tastes charge forward like the evolving, indifferent world around his torn protagonists.

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Murtada's Sundance Awards

Murtada Elfadl closing out his Sundance coverage. Thanks, Murtada!

My first ever Sundance was a blast. So much so I’m already making tentative plans to return next year. Please indulge my 'jury of one' as I hand out awards in traditional categories and ones made up just for your reading pleasure. Please note that I only had time to see 23 movies. Some of the more popular ones I missed included the documentary One Child Nation , Shia LaBeouf's vehicle Honey Boy and the popular comedy Brittany Runs A Marathon. So take all this with a grain of salt...

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