‘Twisters,’ ‘Inside Out 2’ Lead a Wide-Open Field for Grammy Visual Media Categories
In the absence of a phenomenon like “Barbenheimer,” which dominated the Grammys’ visual-media categories last year, the outlook for 2025 is considerably more complicated and, some might say, more interesting.
Look for the summer’s biggest movie hits, “Inside Out 2” and “Deadpool & Wolverine,” to land spots in the score and compilation soundtrack categories when the Grammy nominees are announced Nov. 8. But everything else is up in the air until then.
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The compilation soundtrack category is the toughest to read, as there have been few films with breakout hits. “Twisters” is the summer’s biggest soundtrack, hitting No. 7 on the Billboard charts, so look for the tornado movie to score as an album and potentially in the song category for a pair of original country tunes: Luke Combs’ “Ain’t No Love in Oklahoma” and Lainey Wilson’s “Out of Oklahoma.”
The eclectic “Deadpool & Wolverine” soundtrack — a wild collection featuring everyone from Green Day to Huey Lewis — leads the other choices in the compilation category. Other possibilities include the all-classical “Maestro” album from last year’s Leonard Bernstein biopic and this year’s boy-band romance “The Idea of You.”
Savan Kotecha’s title song from “Idea of You” could also be in the running for the Grammy song category, along with Maren Morris’ “Kiss the Sky” from “The Wild Robot” and last year’s Oscar-nominated Jon Batiste tune “It Never Went Away” from “American Symphony.”
Likely composers in the score category include Andrea Datzman, whose whimsical music for the billion-dollar-grossing “Inside Out 2” instantly catapulted her into the front rank of Pixar composers; Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ techno-infused “Challengers”; Hans Zimmer’s mystical “Dune: Part Two”; and a pair of Oscar-nominated scores from late 2023, Laura Karpman’s jazzy “American Fiction” and Robbie Robertson’s evocative “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which was released just weeks after the legendary songwriter for the Band and longtime Martin Scorsese collaborator passed away at the age of 80.
Another intriguing choice for this category could be Benjamin Wallfisch, who tends to write sophisticated scores for popcorn movies like this summer’s hits “Twisters” and “Alien: Romulus.”
Harder to guess is which television scores might sneak into the category. In the past 15 years, only nine of 78 score nominees were written for the small screen. This year, the widely lauded “Shōgun” (with music by Atticus Ross, Leopold Ross and Nick Chuba) could qualify, along with two recent Emmy winners: Carlos Rafael Rivera’s “Lessons in Chemistry” and Jeff Toyne’s “Palm Royale.” The Grammys’ instrumental arrangement category is another possibility for these composers, as many enter their title themes as arrangements in case they’re bumped by more popular titles in the score category.
Two other Emmy winners appear to have run afoul of the Grammys’ unusual eligibility year (Sept. 16, 2023 through Aug. 30, 2024). Siddhartha Khosla’s “Only Murders in the Building” Season 3 score was eligible last year, and the song “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?” — which recently made songwriters Benj Pasek and Justin Paul EGOT winners — was part of the “deluxe soundtrack” album which, although released Oct. 4, was declared ineligible because the series itself began airing during the previous eligibility period.
Grammy’s video game score soundtrack category, in only its third year, will be the beneficiary of a particularly strong field. Those entered include “Star Wars Outlaws” by Wilbert Roget II; “Spider-Man 2” by John Paesano; “Tales of Kenzera: ZAU” by Nainita Desai; “Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III” by Walter Mair; “Concord” by Daniel Pemberton; “Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown” by Gareth Coker and Mentrix; “Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora” by Pinar Toprak; and “Assassin’s Creed: Mirage” by Brendan Angelides.
It’s a wide-open field, and voters will have a lot of watching and listening to do before the first round of voting concludes on Oct. 15.
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