OVP: Best Original Score (2003)
The Nominees Were...
Danny Elfman, Big Fish
Gabriel Yared, Cold Mountain
Thomas Newman, Finding Nemo
James Horner, House of Sand and Fog
Howard Shore, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
My Thoughts: After the perfection of the Best Song lineup (links to all past contests at the bottom of the page), you'd think we'd be taking a bit of a step back here. After all, Oscar rarely gets it all right, but while Score is not as wonderful as song (unlike Best Song, this is not the lineup that I would've picked), this is a good list, and an unusual one because this reads like a default contest situation for Oscar. All five of these composers, while not Oscar winners (something Thomas Newman doesn't need to be reminded of), are certainly Oscar favorites, five default nominees (and there's not even a John Williams score in sight!).
Part of the reason they are default nominees, though, is that they're consistently excellent. Take Gabriel Yared. It honestly would've been really easy to just play the Cold Mountain music on default, relying on the strong song score to carry us through much of the picture, but Yared still finds a lot of use for his sparing strings and crystal clear piano. It helps that the score signals to the audience when we're about to get a mild reprieve from the tumult of the war, and perhaps a place in the storm for our lovers, but Yared telegraphs that this will only be a short delay, keeping his instrumentals reserved rather than indulging in a lot of big moments...Cold Mountain is not filled with happy endings.
House of Sand and Fog is also not filled with happy endings (lord knows that movie goes off the rails in its final act), but unlike Cold Mountain, the movie's score is far too invasive to the actual picture. It's not it's a bad score (James Horner has had misses, but generally can make pretty music), but it's more that it's so unwelcome. One of my primary pet peeves is when a score is its own character in the movie; this only rarely works (when it's essentially hinting at what's to come next, like a narrator), but House of Sand and Fog's omnipresent strings & winds just say "louder" without adding enough grandeur to the happenings.
A good example of a score that guides its film rather than chokeholds it is Return of the King. Obviously Shore has to rely upon some of the musical cues from his previous movies, but 1) the first two movies have some of the best combined scores in the history of film music and 2) there's still plenty of newness going on here. Particularly the lighting of the beacons, showing some progress in the Gollum theme music to make it feel more frantic, more desperate, or the way that the Pelennor Fields battle feels more final...there's enough subtle changes in keys that Shore uses his previous film's music to trick us & keep the action guessing.
Big Fish was at one point supposed to be a serious Oscar player, but this was the only place that it showed up. The film itself is a bit messy (too long, too dry, too sporadic), which is why it enjoys more of a defense from Burton loyalists than from the larger cinephile community at large ("it's fine" is probably the best descriptor for the picture). The score is good-there's a reason it was turned into a musical-with Elfman finding some lovely moments throughout. It's just...not quite enough for me. Elfman's scores often borrow from themselves, which makes his earlier work his best work in my opinion, and when he goes too far away from that Nightmare Before Christmas aesthetic, it feels kind of banal (which is how I feel about Big Fish).
Thomas Newman is a default nominee at the Oscars at this point, but part of the reason for that was his work in the early-aughts when he was cranking out masterpiece-after-masterpiece. My favorite pair of his scores are Lemony Snickett and Finding Nemo, both Oscar cited. Nemo is possibly the most "complete" Pixar score. It has no songs (other than "just keep swimming"), and a lot of the film is about travel so there needs to be changes in motif while keeping with a similar running theme. Newman does that by hearkening back to a solid strings base, building off of that, but making it feel like the foundation of Marlin & Nemo's relationship. It's beautiful music, and wonderfully effective.
Other Precursor Contenders: The Grammys eligibility window for the best film score nomination is not the same as Oscar's so oftentimes you'll see films from two different years getting citations, and that's the case here. For the 2004 Grammys, Seabiscuit was the only contender in the running (losing to The Two Towers), while the next year Howard Shore's The Return of the King emerged victorious against 2003's Big Fish. The Globes don't have such eligibility issues, and so they gave their trophy to The Return of the King against Big Fish, Cold Mountain, Girl with a Pearl Earring, and The Last Samurai, while the BAFTA's went with Cold Mountain against Girl with a Pearl Earring, Kill Bill: Volume 1, Lost in Translation, and The Return of the King. In terms of sixth place, logic would dictate it was Girl with a Pearl Earring, but this was in the years where Alexandre Desplat couldn't get arrested in this category (hard to believe now, right?), so I wonder if the clubbier Hans Zimmer (Last Samurai) or Randy Newman (Seabiscuit) might've been a better bet.
Films I Would Have Nominated: You know how I said I don't mind when a score becomes a character IF it basically becomes the movie's narrator? There's perhaps no greater example of that than the iconic music from Pirates of the Caribbean. Considering how integral this music would become to movies in the next ten years, it's a pity that Oscar didn't have the foresight to nominate it.
Oscar’s Choice: Shore might've struggled if Return hadn't been so strong (Oscar doesn't usually give this category to sequels), but two years after his victory for Fellowship, he took it again.
My Choice: I'm going to disrupt the paradigm a bit here and do something I haven't done before-give Return of the King second place. I think the combination of Shore borrowing from himself and the genius that Gabriel Yared brings to Cold Mountain warrant a just miss (it's close though). I'll put Nemo in third, followed by Big Fish and House of Sand and Fog.
Those are my thoughts-how about yours? Are you going to dare come hang out with me on Cold Mountain, or is everyone safely looking at me with crazy eyes from Middle Earth? Why do you think it took Oscar so long to honor Alexandre Desplat? And come on-we all agree that Pirates missing here is blasphemy, right? Share your thoughts below!
Also in 2003: Original Song, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Previously in 2003
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