Oscars Best Original Score breakdown: ‘The Brutalist’ has slight edge in a wide-open race
The Oscar race for Best Original Score has focused on two top contenders. Here’s a breakdown of the race.
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Frontrunner: The Brutalist, by Daniel Blumberg
This is one of four scores in this category that swept the nominations with bids from the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards, BAFTAs, and Society of Composers and Lyricists (SCL) — the others are Conclave, Emilia Pérez, and The Wild Robot. Blumberg’s score won the BAFTA, another strong sign in his favor. In addition, this music has won awards from the Washington, D.C., Area Film Critics Association, the Boston Society of Film Critics, the New York Film Critics Online, and the Philadelphia Film Critics Circle, to name a few. And while Blumberg doesn’t have any Oscar priors — this is his first nomination — one could certainly argue that he has composed the most conspicuous orchestral score. The film is three-and-a-half hours long, and the score soundtrack is 81 minutes, complete with an overture and intermission.
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The Brutalist also has the best odds for Best Picture, which helps. Last year’s winner in this category was Best Picture champ Oppenheimer, another lengthy epic about a tortured genius, and over the last 10 years, eight winners for Best Original Score were at least nominated for Best Picture. The two exceptions were The Hateful Eight (2015), which had the benefit of being Ennio Morricone‘s overdue first competitive Oscar win, and Soul (2020), an animated film that was about a musician and featured music from Jon Batiste along with the aforementioned Reznor and Ross.
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Potential spoiler: Conclave, by Volker Bertelmann
Bertelmann is one of only two composers in this category who has won an Oscar for an original score before — he prevailed just two years ago for All Quiet on the Western Front, while Wicked co-composer Stephen Schwartz won for Pocahontas (1995) — so we know the Academy is fond of Bertelmann’s work. Conclave also has many of the same advantages that The Brutalist has, with an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, as well as Golden Globe, Critics Choice, BAFTA, and SCL nominations for its score. And he won Best Original Score honors from critics in Phoenix … but that’s it. Where Bertelmann is disadvantaged is that despite nominations from groups across the country, he hasn’t won almost any of them. The SCL Award went to The Wild Robot, while the BAFTA was bestowed on The Brutalist.
Underdog: Emilia Pérez, by Camille and Clément Ducol
Don’t count out the 13-time Oscar-nominated musical, for which Camille and Ducol have three bids: once for Best Original Score and twice for Best Original Song (“El Mal” and “Mi Camino”). They’re the only composers in this race with multiple nominations, and voters may want to honor their overall achievement since the music is crucial to the film’s success. In that way, they could follow in the footsteps of Justin Hurwitz, who ended up winning Best Original Score and Best Original Song for the musical La La Land (2016).
Camille and Ducol were also awarded Best Composer at the 2024 Cannes Film Festival. They won Best Song at the Golden Globes (for “El Mal”). And they won the Hollywood Music in Media Award (HMMA) for Best Original Score – Feature Film, defeating Conclave; The Brutalist and Wicked weren’t nominated there for their scores, while The Wild Robot competed in and won the race for animated films. The HMMAs are voted on by music peers and entertainment industry professionals, so their results could be especially telling as the Oscars are also a peer-voted event.
What makes Emilia Pérez an underdog here, and possibly everywhere else, is the controversy that has surrounded the film. It came under fire for its representations of the transgender and Mexican communities, and then racist tweets by its star Karla Sofía Gascón were uncovered, leading to a firestorm of media statements and public appearances that only seemed to make matters worse. Director Jacques Audiard initially distanced himself from Gascón, while costar Zoe Salda?a denounced her tweets. It’s possible that Camille and Ducol will emerge unscathed, but if it turns out the entire film has been tainted by scandal, then certainly the film’s core artistic achievement, its music, could suffer as a result. We’ll find out soon how much the industry is still willing to embrace Emilia Pérez, but the Society of Composers and Lyricists just shut out the film. A sign of things to come?
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