…And once again there is at least one head scratcher among them. But before we get to that, let’s review my original fearless predictions for the nominations: Alice in Wonderland (Danny Elfman), Inception (Hans Zimmer), The King’s Speech (Alexandre Desplat), 127 Hours (A.R. Rahman), and The Social Network (Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross). And I’m happy to report that I picked four of the five correct, with only Alice not being nominated and, for some reason, John Powell’s How to Train Your Dragon being given a nomination.
Now, I’m not saying anything bad about Powell, and I didn’t see How to Train Your Dragon. I respect Powell and his work, and think that his scores for the Jason Bourne films are great examples of excellet film scoring. But, in all seriousness: AMPAS – this is what happens when you disallow some scores based on arcane rules about interpolated pre-existing material (i.e. – the rulings on Black Swan and True Grit). At least they saw their way to actually nominate The Social Network, one of my top three scores of the year (along with Inception and TRON: Legacy).
But now that the nominations are out, who will win? My choice is for The Social Network, and I honestly think it will win…at least I hope it will. If not TSN then hopefully Inception. Both are worthly winners in what was a fantastic year for film scores, even if some of the best were not nominated.
Good night, and good luck.
Reznor will probably win because the Academy likes to reinforce the “anybody can do it” mentality. That isn’t a reflection on Reznor’s score. I’ve heard it but I haven’t seen the film so I have no idea what the interaction is like, but I do prefer to have some sort of cohesion in my scores and there’s not much there to go on.
Suprisingly, How to Train Your Dragon is a quite good score. I don’t know if it’s Oscar nomination worthy, but it is good. As a side note to this particular score, the main tune sounds an awful lot like a real Celtic folk tune. I wonder what the Academy ruling is on that?
That being said, if Reznor doesn’t win then Alexandre Desplat probably does because of the tidal wave of buzz that The King’s Speech is riding.