The Academy Awards are just a few days away and the nominees for this year’s Best Original Score feature an impressive and competitive group of composers. The Power of the Dog is nominated for 12 Oscars and is closely followed by Dune with 10 Oscar nominations. This year’s contenders also include the first Latina woman to ever be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Original Score.
WQXR's Spring Intern, Donna Baeck, took a closer look at the 2022 Oscar-nominees for Best Original Score.
Dune - Hans Zimmer
Dune is a film adaptation of author Frank Herbert’s 1965 epic science-fiction novel. The story takes place in the year 10191 and follows the journey of a prophesied hero, Paul Atreides, who is fated to become the leader of the desert planet, Arrakis. The planet produces a mysterious spice which prolongs human life and attracts greedy outsiders to mine the land for it. Hans Zimmer has composed and produced over 150 film scores since the 1980s including award-winning films like the Lion King, Inception,Gladiator, and Interstellar. Zimmer’s work is known for integrating electronic music sounds with traditional orchestral arrangements and his music for Dune will be his 12th Oscar nomination.
His score matches the retro-future and outer-worldly vibe of the film with the use of synthesizers to make instruments sound unrecognizable. According to The New York Times, Zimmer also incorporated the sounds of “scraping metal, Indian bamboo flutes, Irish whistles, a juddering drum phrase, and a war horn that is actually a cello to create an otherworldly soundtrack.” The score is driven by a choir of female voices to represent the Bene Gesserit, a covert sisterhood skilled in combat and mind control, and is led by vocalist Loire Cotler and includes Dead Can Dance’s Lisa Gerrard.
Encanto - Germaine Franco
Film composer Germaine Franco is smashing glass ceilings with her Oscar nomination for Disney Animation’s Encanto. She is the sixth woman to ever be nominated for best original score in Academy Award history and the film is also Disney’s first feature to be scored by a woman. The story takes place in Colombia and tells the tale of Mirabel Madrigal, who is born into a magical family where everyone has a special gift except for her. Mirabel’s mother is able to heal a wound with a home-cooked meal. Everyone in their village can rely on her older sister, Luisa, to lift six donkeys without breaking a sweat, and her oldest sister, Isabela, is seen as “perfect and beautiful” and can create breath-taking flowers out of thin air. Throughout the film Mirabel tries to save the source of her family’s gifts while also facing a tense relationship with Abuela, the matriarch of the Madrigal family.
The magic in the film was based on the magical realism that comes from the influences of Afro-Colombian and Indigenous cultures. Franco used a mix of traditional Colombian instruments such as a harp known as the arpa llanera, a traditional flute called a gaita, and a percussion-scarped instrument, the guacharaca, to reflect the magical realism found in Latin American literature, according to Deadline. Franco told Spotify she wanted to incorporate the female voice throughout the score and recorded a live choir from Colombia featuring Isa Mosquera who is one of the backing vocalists in Carlos Vives’ band. The film’s music brings you inside the magical world of the Madrigal family and you’ll find it hard not to sing along with the characters.
The Power of the Dog - Jonny Greenwood
Many of us recognize Jonny Greenwood as the lead guitarist for the rock band Radiohead, but he also has an impressive background of scoring films. His previous work includes There Will Be Blood, Phantom Thread, We Need to Talk About Kevin, and You Were Never Really Here. Greenwood’s latest score and second Oscar nomination is for Director Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog, which is based on a 1967 novel by Thomas Savage. The story follows brothers Phil and George Burbank who are wealthy ranch owners in Montana during the 1920s. Their relationship takes a negative turn after George marries a widowed restaurateur named Rose and out of jealousy and self-hatred, Phil makes her life miserable on the ranch.
Greenwood’s score is dark and eerie while also reflecting the Western genre of the film and the complicated personalities of the characters. Greenwood manipulated orchestral instruments in a creative way to produce off-kilter sounds to suit the sinister nature of the film — you can hear the cello being played like a banjo throughout the film to represent Phil’s personality. According to an interview withIndieWire, Greenwood borrowed a piano tuning wrench and detuned his computer-controlled piano while it was playing to bend the notes.
Don’t Look Up - Nicholas Britell
Three-time Academy Award nominee and composer Nicholas Britell told Variety that Don’t Look Up has been his "most challenging score to write so far." The story portrays two astronomers who discover a comet is on its way to destroy planet Earth in six months. They are forced to embark on a giant media tour to warn mankind of the impending doom they are about to face, but the problem is that no one seems to care. This is Britell’s fourth film working with Director Adam McKay and his previous scores for McKay include, The Big Short, Vice, and Succession. The film’s cast is stacked with big-name actors including Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Lawrence, Meryl Streep, Cate Blanchett, and other celebrities. Britell was challenged to balance the different tones throughout the film from the comedic aspects to the feelings of anxiety and impending doom. His score features, “a mix of jazz, traditional orchestral sounds, and offbeat instruments such as the toy piano, banjo, and mandolin,” according to Variety.
Parallel Mothers (Madres paralelas) - Alberto Iglesias
Alberto Iglesias’s score for Parallel Mothers embodies the thoughts and feelings of the film’s main character, Janis. The film portrays two single women, Janis and Ana, who meet for the first time when they share a room at the hospital to give birth on the same day. Janis is 40-years-old and is looking forward to being a mother, while Ana is only 17-years-old and is terrified about this next stage of her life. They form a strong bond with one another through this shared experience of motherhood and their lives become closely intertwined.
Iglesias has worked alongside director Pedro Almodóvar since 1995 and this will be the duo’s 13th film together. This will be the fourth Oscar nomination for Iglesias, but the first film score he’s written for Almodóvar to get nominated. Iglesias’s primary focus was to get inside the head of Janis in order for the score to closely reflect her character. The music is “the narrator of her soul” and represents Janis’s feelings of “fear, terror, desperation, anguish, and hope,” Iglesias told Variety.He worked with a small chamber ensemble to score the birth scenes early on in the film, as well as a string quintet and a larger string orchestra with piano and a few woodwinds to capture Janis's emotions throughout, according to Spitfire Audio.
In case you haven't had your fill of cinematic music, here's a playlist of our favorite Oscar-nominated film scores: