What do you hear in a great film score? Perhaps it’s a symbolic theme or a meaningful leitmotif that ties the film together. Maybe you want an innovative composition that makes your film feel modern while mining the cutting edge. Or maybe you want a grand, all-out throwback with all the parts of the orchestra playing like in the old days.
If you’re a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, you probably want a score that’s so generic you can’t hear it. This has been a fantastic year for film scores, but you wouldn’t know it by just looking at the Oscar nominations. Between Anonymity and Self-Plagiarism by Max Richter hamnet Score and Alexandre Desplat frankensteinWe have Juskin Fendrix’s music as participatory prize size. BugoniaIt’s a collection of creaking strings that’s as delightfully atonal and instantly forgettable as the movies they soundtracked. Of course, there are a few standouts. Ludwig Göransson sinner The score freely mixes blues, power metal, and turntables with Irish folk and fingerstyle Appalachian bluegrass, embodying the kind of transcendent cultural syncretism that Ryan Coogler’s plot sometimes struggles to achieve. It’s far more interesting and worthy than his Oscar-winning work. Oppenheimer. Meanwhile, Johnny Greenwood produced some real Hollywood music. another battleUtilizes the full orchestra for moments of massive impact without bombing.
It would be easy to blame the Oscars for their boring taste. I just did it, so let’s continue. First of all, they have long maintained a complex relationship between music and merit. In 1934, the first Academy Award for Best Original Score was awarded to “Columbia Studio Music Department” for a musical romance set to an opera. one night love. For a long time, the Academy gave separate awards for musicals and non-musicals, or combined musical and original song categories. As recently as 1998, they gave one award for Original Musical or Comedy Music and another for Original Dramatic Music, suggesting an inherent distinction between the two.
Many worthy scores have won Oscars, many of them classics. Jaws, Star Wars, ETOthers not written by John Williams. Sometimes, like Ryuichi Sakamoto’s win in 1987, the last emperorThe Oscars basically awarded the right composer at the right time. But like the acting category, they tend to arrive decades late. No one believes that Hans Zimmer did his best in Denis Villeneuve’s work. sand dune, Or do you think Ennio Morricone finally deserved the win? The Hateful Eight. Carter Burwell has been nominated twice for his work with Martin McDonagh, but never with the Coen Brothers. Indie musicians have been plagiarizing John Carpenter for nearly 50 years, but the man has never been nominated or expected to be nominated.
That’s not to say the Academy never awards great music, but it’s often the exception. These days they favor huge, pounding, electronically assisted orchestral scores. Film critic David Sims once described their grand, clicking cadence as “typewriter.” Take a break right now and hum a few words from Volker Bertelmann. All Quiet on the Western Front The score or the searing, humorless music by Hildur Guðnadóttir. joker. This score forces viewers into submission, smashing phone speakers and budget soundbars, pay attention you are watching a movie now. It is a composition as pure spectacle.
Thankfully, like all good things, you don’t have to rely on the Academy for quality. 2025 was an exceptionally good year for film music. If I were standing next to Helen Mirren on stage at the Oscars, this is what I would say: Some of these composers have re-scored some of the best-loved and most iconic scores in film history, while others have pushed the boundaries of film composition. In the process, they showed us everything the original score could and should do. So, without further ado, here are the replacement candidates:
young father – 28 years later
Danny Boyle’s comeback 28 (space) later The franchise was full of powerful and imaginative creative choices. Among them was the Scottish alternative hip-hop group Young Fathers, who were drafted in to do the score. Mirroring Boyle’s bugnut digital experiments, The Fathers project the elements of modern horror music – piercing strings, low-mid buzzes and crushing static washes – through a vocal-heavy prism, achieving a singular balance of beauty and menace, while producing a full set of honest-to-goodness songs that call back to film score classics. There are jams here (“Promised Land”) and grandiose, sweeping declarations (“Remember”), often accompanied by distorted, sampled vocals that illustrate the overarching theme “Remember me when I go,” but they blend too obliquely with Boyle’s grandiose psychedelic palette.
Kangding Lei – Sirat
I knew I would love Sirat From the moment I heard the tagline: A group of ravers traveling the Moroccan desert in search of a party at the end of the world. I had no idea how perfectly German DJ Kangding Ray’s four-story techno score would form the core of the film, providing a literal marching beat to this apocalyptic quest. Where a more tentative composer (or director) might have focused on the old Tangerine Dream score, Ray turns their death trip into a party, stripping away the glitz and glamor of EDM, the high end ping-ponging with ceaseless pulsating beats, an entirely artificial match for the natural devastation of the desert, dancing on and on and on and on and on, into oblivion.
Daniel Bloomberg – Ann Lee’s Last Words
Blumberg, once an indie rock prodigy, won an Oscar last year for his slick, bombastic score for Brady Corbet. hyaena. That guy deserves another job brutalist by co-author Mona Fastvold Ann Lee’s Last WordsIt’s a fairly convoluted proposition in all respects. To tell the life of Shaker mystic Ann Lee, Fastvold created a musical that conveys the profound spiritual longings of Lee and her group through song and dance. Beginning with Shaker hymns and period instruments, Blumberg composes an avant-garde symphony. sinner-A style tour through the American musical canon. We convey the Shakers’ great desire to come together as one through the ringing of worship bells, scraping strings, pounding rhythms and searing waves of electric guitar, a wild combination of ecstasy and bleakness.
Daniel Lopatin – marty supreme
marty supreme This is the third impeccable score that Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never) has composed for a Safdie Brothers project. If I prefer the slightly more chiptune monster of his 2017 music. good timeHis work here is not trivial. Despite being set in the 1950s, Supreme It feels like a Reagan-era sports movie turned inside out. Lopatin draws on the full spectrum of 80s music – British dream pop, American joke jams and Japanese new age greats – to convey and distort the Tony Scott feel. His score expresses the constant anxiety of a con man and the tight inner life of a man who longs for a future era of fluid social access and rampant morality. even makes table tennis Feel the momentum.
Rob Mazurek – mastermind
Kelly Reichardt’s filmography may be best known for its quiet nature, but she has a tradition of quietly scoring good marks. Yo La Tengo, William Tyler, Ethan Rose, and even Andre Benjamin have all contributed enormously iconic (sometimes career-best) work to her character study of the American loner, and avant jazz cornetist Rob Mazurek has continued this trend. Armed with fast-moving drums and lonely horns, Mazurek’s compositions embody an inner life. mastermind‘s nebulous protagonist, ostensibly an art thief, JB Mooney appears whenever he sleepwalks and gets himself into another predicament. Music tells him what he can and won’t do. No matter how small, thrills always trump loyalty and responsibility. You have to get it at any cost. It’s as American a subject as you can find.
Whether you’re looking for acoustic or electronic, modern or old-fashioned, big or small, we’re living in a golden age of film scores, filled with game composers looking to bring the form into the gathering hall or dance floor. And you don’t need me or Helen Mirren or even the actual Academy to tell you that.
