Annal:2004 Golden Globe Award for Best Original Score

From AwardAnnals

Results of the Golden Globe Award in the year 2004. For a ranked list of albums, try an honor roll:

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: Music from the Motion Picture

2004 Golden Globe-Score winner
2004 Oscar-Score winner
2004 BAFTA-Music nominee
Score: 26.54

This final chapter of Peter Jackson’s sprawling adaptation of Tolkien’s “Ring” trilogy closes out one of the most accomplished cycles in cinema—and film music—history. As he’s done for the saga’s first two installments, composer Howard Shore has honed a mature, brooding orchestral masterpiece that’s long on subtle shadings of mood and nuance, while eschewing the hollow bombast that’s characterized all too many mainstream action and adventure films for three decades. If anything, he’s pared this chapter of his music for Middle Earth even closer to the bone, the…

Cold Mountain: Music From The Motion Picture

Gabriel Yared

2004 BAFTA-Music winner
2004 Golden Globe-Score nominee
2004 Oscar-Score nominee
Score: 22.54

Director Anthony Minghella’s take on Charles Frazier’s bestselling novel is powered by wistful romanticism and a dramatic structure that’s been compared to Homer’s Odyssey. That latter creative tack parallels the Coens’ O Brother, Where Art Thou in crucial ways, and is further enhanced by another T-Bone Burnett-produced soundtrack of Appalachian-inflected folk traditionals, sympathetic originals by diverse songwriters (Elvis Costello and Sting), and a core of gritty performances (the White Stripe’s Jack White and Alison Krauss) that rise above mere…

Big Fish: Music from the Motion Picture

Danny Elfman, Various Artists

2004 Golden Globe-Score nominee
2004 Oscar-Score nominee
Score: 12.54

Director Tim Burton’s adaptation of author Daniel Wallace’s bittersweet Southern Gothic novel has been billed as his first mainstream character drama, a notion that conveniently ignores the story’s inherent fables and flights of imagination. But composer Danny Elfman understands their every dark nook and murky cranny with this magical, often deftly understated score. While the epic melodrama of his comic book scores (Batman, Spider-Man, The Hulk, et. al.) have made him a mainstream Hollywood music star, longtime fans know that the composer’s…

The Last Samurai: Original Motion Picture Score

Hans Zimmer

2004 Golden Globe-Score nominee
Score: 6.54

Whether Tom Cruise’s portrayal of a 19th century American soldier cum samurai warrior will be remembered with the same pangs of pop-cultural bemusement that befell John Wayne playing Genghis Khan remains to be seen. But its musical soundtrack does mark an auspicious occasion: pop musician-turned-composer Hans Zimmer’s 100th score since beginning his film career in 1988. A pioneer of fusing both the electronic and orchestral and the Westernized with the indigenous, Zimmer does both here with skill, drawing heavily on samples of the traditional Taiko (a…