As the 2024 Academy Awards is set to start next week Sunday, March 10, all attention is honed in on the highly-stacked set of nominees.
For one, many are "itching" to know whether or not Oppenheimer could break the all-time Oscar record of most wins in a single ceremony by one film through its 13 nominations. In contrast, others are curious if Bradley Cooper can join the ranks of Lawrence Olivier and Roberto Benigni as the only best actor-director winners.
That said, in the classical music space, perhaps the most discussed category is the Best Original Score and the arguably contentious conversations regarding this year's potential winner.
This is perhaps because of the preeminent composers included as nominees in the category, including John Williams, Ludwig Göransson, Laura Karpman, Jerskin Fendrix, and Robbie Robertson, pushing an unprecedented air of competitiveness,
So, in anticipation of the forthcoming iteration of the Oscars, Classicalite is offering a retrospective of the Best Original Score winners in the past 10 years, right below.
Composer Steven Price celebrates winning Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures, Original Score for 'Gravity' in the press room during the 86th Academy Awards on March 2nd, 2014 in Hollywood, California.
Best Original Score Winners From 2014 to 2017
Let's start with 2014's winner: Stephen Price's chilling original score for the 2013 Alfonso Cuarón sci-fi thriller classic, "Gravity."
On the composer's website, he described the whole experience working with Cuarón as "intense and experimental," after being launched into the challenging endeavor of capturing the eerie calm that the vacuum of space possesses through music.
He noted that he initially felt disappointed when recording the vital trumpet part of the piece before a synth processing it accidentally "blew up" and "made a great, indescribable, and unrepeatable sound," cementing it as one of the composer's favorite parts of the track.
In contrast, the 2015 score of "The Grand Budapest Hotel" by Alexandre Desplat is a more traditional take on film music. Essentially, his goal was to create a "cultural sound" from the fictional place, the Republic of Zubrowka.
Desplat approached the challenge by deriving from real-life music of countries in Central Europe, including Czechia, Hungary, Poland, and Germany, collaborating with 50 Russian and French balalaika players to do so.
He also incorporated region-specific instruments like zithers, cimbaloms, and enormous alpine horns.
Ennio Morricone, the 2016 winner and the oldest nominee to ever win an award in the ceremony at the age of 87, won the Best Original Score honor for his work in Quentin Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight."
Originally, Morricone turned down the opportunity but eventually reconsidered it under the clause that he would only do around 25 minutes worth.
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Composer Ludwig Goransson, winner Best Original Score for "Black Panther," poses in the press room during the 91st Annual Academy Awards at Hollywood and Highland on February 24, 2019 in Hollywood, California.
Best Original Score Winners From 2017 to 2019
Justin Hurwitz, who won in 2017 for his "La La Land" score, did the opposite of what Morricone did as he sent just about 2000 piano demos to the musical film's director, Damien Chazelle.
This already lengthy process was exacerbated by the back and forth between the composer and director that preceded the actual orchestration that Hurwitz did. That said, it was worth it in the end, after winning the sought-after award.
In 2018, Alexandre Desplat returned to the Academy Awards ceremony and was welcomed with another Best Original Score win for his orchestration in "The Shape of Water," the opportunity of which he reportedly discussed with Guillermo del Toro over a meal.
Just like his work in the Wes Anderson film, Desplat once again drew inspiration from real cultural sounds. For this particular work, he looked into his own experiences during his formative years in the Caribbean as the foundations of his "blurred underwater sound" for the track.
Similarly, Ludwig Göransson's iconic score for "Black Panther," which earned him the 2019 Best Original Score Award, pulled him across the North Atlantic Ocean and into Senegal and South Africa under the pretense of researching the countries' musical culture.
He later incorporated his twist to these sounds by mixing superhero motifs with soundscapes that JS Bach had originated, alongside contemporary elements courtesy of his collaboration with Childish Gambino.
Icelandic musician Hildur Gudnadottir accepts the award for Best Original Score for "Joker" during the 92nd Oscars at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood, California on February 9, 2020.
Best Original Score Winners From 2020 to 2023
Entering the current decade, Hildur Guðnadóttir's 2020 work for "Joker" made a momentous mark as it seamlessly blended both the enthralling acting of Joaquin Phoenix and the rebellious direction of Todd Howard in a provocative track.
The bathroom pseudo-ballet scene, in particular, pushed the medium in a new manner enough to give two of the golden statuettes to both Phoenix and Guðnadóttir.
2021 winners Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, alongside featured artist Jon Batiste, also made a film-resonant theme that perfectly captured the ethereal and spiritual aspect of jazz in the Pixar animated film, "Soul."
Batiste's contributions, specifically, were instrumental in bringing the contemplative flavor to the film that is arguably unique to New York's brand of jazz. His motions even aided the animators in incorporating the beautiful physicality involved in live performance, pushing the film as Oscar-worthy.
When one thinks of sci-fi themes of epic proportions, Hans Zimmer's name would undoubtedly pop up, at least that is true during the 2022 iteration of the Oscars after he won the Best Original Score Award for his work in "Dune: Part 1."
To do so, Zimmer constructed a unique metal housing that distorted the elegant hum of cellos into something more suited for the battlefield and is reminiscent of Tibetan war horns.
Add the goosebumps-inducing performance from American vocalist Loire Cotler and you have an Oscar-winning classic from Zimmer.
In 2023, Volker Bertelmann bagged the win for the Best Orginal Score Award for his score to a film based on The Great War entitled "All Quiet on the Western Front."
Under director Edward Berger's sole instruction to bring forth a "destructive" track, he found and utilized an over-a-hundred-year-old harmonium that was previously his great-grandmother's to produce an eerie and distorted sound that became central to the score.
