Honor roll:Academy Award® for Achievement in Music (Original Score)
From AwardAnnals
Each of these albums has been nominated for a Academy Award® for Achievement in Music (Original Score). They are ranked by honors received.
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- Academy Award® for Achievement in Music (Original Score) artists
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Slumdog Millionaire: Score
In composing the music for acclaimed director Danny Boyle’s intoxicating new film Slumdog Millionaire, A.R. Rahman has conjured the sound of a city, fusing the frenetic scramble of daily life in Mumbai, India into beautiful fugues that ride upon the dust clouds kicked up by its everyday people.
From the movie’s first frames—with children racing through alleyways, knocking over merchants and pottery, police kicking loose clay roof tiles, disrupted birds fluttering from gutters—we hear the sound of their commotion made manifest in “O…Saya.” It’s a rumbling hybrid of Bollywood and hip-hop, a brand new collaboration between Rahman and M.I.A. It’s the kind of cinematic moment where image and sound coexist. And that’s only the first five minutes.
Filmed in the streets and slums of Mumbai, India, Boyle needed just the right music to compliment the film’s cinema verité urban realism. He turned to internationally renowned composer A.R. Rahman (a huge star in South Asia—selling more than 100 million albums worldwide and 200 million cassettes—Rahman is one of the…
Atonement: Music from the Motion Picture
The filmmakers of Pride and Prejudice (director Joe Wright) reunite for Atonement, based on the award-winning, best-selling 2002 novel, a classic British romance that spans several decades. The Decca soundtrack will be released on December 4 and features original music by Academy Award® nominee Dario Marianelli, (Pride and Prejudice) with piano solos performed by Decca artist Jean Yves-Thibaudet.
Babel: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
This soundtrack takes us on a journey with no beginning or end, with music that illuminates the film as well as the creative process behind it. “Gustavo found the musical and spiritual DNA of the film playing the oud with his sensitive fingertips, producing the mesmerizing sounds of the scored tracks in these CDs,” Babel director Alejandro González Iñárritu says. “I hope when you listen you can feel the distant winds of the planet caressing your skin.”
Memoirs of a Geisha: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Director Rob Marshall hired three of Asia’s most fabulous stars (Zhang Ziyi, Michelle Yeoh, and Gong Li) for this Japan-set movie, so one wonders why he didn’t put in a call to a local composer as well. Was Tan Dun’s line busy? Was Joe Hisaishi otherwise engaged? In any case, John Williams won the assignment, and he didn’t end up with egg on his face. Mercifully, Williams left the bombast at home and put cellist Yo-Yo Ma and violinist Itzhak Perlman to good use in this sensitive score. The lovely “Sayuri’s Theme” resurfaces at regular intervals, and it’s good to…
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: Music from the Motion Picture
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…
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
The classical works of Tan Dun typically fuse compositional elements from the East and the West, but for his soundtrack to Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, musical cultures aren’t so much blurred as coexistent side-by-side. While the magical martial arts film doesn’t boast music as stunning as its visuals, this soundtrack is still beautiful and elegant, a perfect complement to the movie’s mysticism. Just don’t expect epic, John Williams-inspired bombast here. On “A Wedding Interrupted,” the riveting brass and string section introduction segues…
Brokeback Mountain: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
Argentina-born, California-based Gustavo Santaolalla helped shape the rock en Español movement by producing Mexican bands Molotov and Café Tacuba , and Colombian singer Juanes. In the late 1990s he made a switch to soundtracks, working on well-received albums for Amores Perros and The Motorcycle Diaries. His instrumental contributions to Ang Lee’s tale of two cowboys in love are acoustic guitar-based and, let’s face it, a bit on the sonic-wallpaper side.
The vocal tracks, on the other hand, are uniformly lovely, even if the selection of…
Finding Neverland: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
As did the Lewis Carroll/Alice in Wonderland-rooted Dreamchild before it, Finding Neverlandexplores the all-too-human roots of an English children’ s literature classic, in this case author James Mathew Barrie’s (Johnny Depp) enduring fable, Peter Pan. Polish stage composer cum film scorer Jan A. P. Kaczmarek takes the film’s fantasy-leavened, yet ultimately bittersweet tale of Barrie, his losing battle with adulthood and the magic world of prose it inspired and invests it with an exuberant score that positively pulses with…
Cold Mountain: Music From The Motion Picture
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…
The Hours: Music from the Motion Picture
How better to score a movie that takes place in three tangentially related time periods than with music that strives for timelessness? The hallmarks of Philip Glass’s minimalism serve The Hours well. The film, based on Michael Cunningham’s novel, tells the stories of three women—Virginia Woolf in the early 1920s, a housewife just after World War II, and a book editor in the present—whose days relate in different ways to Woolf’s novel Mrs. Dalloway. Yet rather than construct a sonic montage of these three time periods (perhaps some Ravel for Woolf,…
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