Can Reznor and Ross make Oscar history?

by Cláudio Alves

In 2008, the music branch of the Academy caused a stir when it announced that The Dark Knight was disqualified from the Best Original Score race. The reason for this had nothing to do with the use of non-original compositions as it's often the case. Instead, AMPAS had deemed that the picture had too many composers. In total, there were five credited artists – Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard, Alex Gibson, Mel Wesson, and Lorne Balfe. Even though the first two did most of the soundtrack and the remaining three signed affidavits relinquishing their chance at a nod, the Academy didn't budge.

Since then, rules have changed and then changed back again. Still, the presence of collaborative teams on the Academy's lists of nominees remains rare. In the past decade, only The Social Network, Lion, and Her have earned nominations for featuring the credited work of multiple composers. The first example even won Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross the Oscar. The erstwhile Nine Inch Nails members are back in contention this year. Thanks to Mank and Soul, they might become the first such team to receive a double nomination, effectively competing against themselves…

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Ludovico Einaudi on the big screen

by Cláudio Alves

After its premiere in Venice and the Golden Lion victory, Chloé Zhao's Nomadland has quickly become one of the most talked-about and most critically acclaimed films of 2020. Personally, I can't wait to watch the nomadic drama starring Frances McDormand, though I'm uncertain when the picture will be coming to Portugal. For the cinephiles of the USA, however, Nomadland is being theatrically released tomorrow, December 4th. If you feel safe enough to do so and it's playing nearby, you can venture into the cinema and experience Zhao's new film.

Meanwhile, I'll wait and let my expectations ferment and grow like some metaphorical sourdough starter. While much has been written about the picture's sweeping landscapes, intriguing narrative, and applause-worthy performances, I confess the singular element I'm most excitingly anticipating is its music. Specifically, Ludovico Einaudi's latest film score…

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Ennio Morricone (1928-2020)

by Nathaniel R

Confession, dear reader. Two decades of writing about movies later I still feel ill-equipped to write about one of the largest tools in the filmmaking arsenal: scoring. Ennio Morricone once described music as "energy, space, and time" which is a broad and huge and cosmic enough description to explain away how overwhelming a task it is to write about... especially to those of us who are more visually attuned. As you've undoubtedly heard, Morricone, by all accounts of the all time great composers, has passed away at the age of 91 after a fall which hospitalized him. In the course of his spectacular career, which stretches across six decades of cinema, he helped defined an entire genre (the spaghetti western), and composed the scores for over three hundred movies as well as an alarming number of TV shows on the side.

His six Oscar nominations (Days of Heaven, The Mission, The Untouchables, Bugsy, Malena, The Hateful Eight) and two Oscars (one of them an Honorary) don't even begin to cover what he gave to the cinema. He was beloved by auteurs as is amply evident in his filmography. Some of his most famous films and scores outside of those Oscar-honored works include The Good The Bad and the Ugly, La Cage Aux Folles, Lady of the Camelias, Once Upon a Time in America, Inglorious Basterds, Wolf, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, For a Few Dollars More, Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion, and Cinema Paradiso. Do you have a favourite score from that illustrious body of work?

Morricone is survived by his wife of 63 years, Maria Travia, and their four children. He will be missed but his legacy has long since been immortalized.

April Foolish Predix Pt 2: Visuals & Sound

Hello brave readers willing to fantasize about the 93rd annual Academy Awards while the bulk of the internet (but not us!) is convinced they won't exist! We've previously covered potential options for Best Animated Feature so now let's talk all the craft categories before we get to the 'big eight' (Screenplays, Director, Acting, and Picture). It's a wild wild world out there in terms of possibility. We only know:

a) which movies are "definitely*" still planning to open this year
b) the kinds of things Oscar tends to like in a normal year
c) a vague idea and plentiful hunches about which movies are closest to being finished in post-production and will risk opening. 

So please take all of these predictions in the way they are intended: a bit of fantasy escapism based on past punditry experience mixed with vague ideas about what might happen in the future of this tumultuous year. 

VISUAL CATEGORIES
Our favourite film categories to think about apart from Actressing & International Film. Come look at what we think might happen in Costume Design, Cinematography, and more. 

SOUND CATEGORIES
These are much less fact-based. Composers are often the last part of a creative team hired so a lot of upcoming pictures dont have composers announced yet. Especially since Hollywood isn't at work at the moment. So this is wild guesswork. We also dont know which movies will have original songs. So we are blindfolded while looking at these crystal balls. It's quite odd, punditry, in this pandemic world.

1999 with Nick: Best Original Score

This week, in advance of the 2019 Oscars, Nick Davis is looking back at the Academy races of 20 years ago, spotlighting movies he’d never seen and what they teach us about those categories, then and now...

the surprise winner

Spotlight Movie: The Red Violin
One of the most exciting things that can happen on Oscar night is when a movie with no other nominations wins one of the “craft” or “technical” or “below-the-line” categories—three bad names for the races where very few contenders are celebrities. In a year like the current one, where the Best Picture nominees ran the table to a historic degree, and consuming most of the spots in every other race, we have even fewer prospects than usual to see this occur. I’d love to watch The Lighthouse win Cinematography or Ad Astra win Sound Mixing, both because they deserve these victories on merit and because it’s nice (but mostly false) to hope that Oscar voters make discerning judgments from category to category based on each discrete department of artistry.

The Red Violin’s Best Original Score trophy at the 1999 Oscars represented one of these glorious instances, and registered as a significant upset at the time...

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