Oscars 2024: ‘Barbie,’ ‘Oppenheimer’ Top Oscar Score Race List
variety.comJon Burlingame Approaches to film scoring have become increasingly eclectic—from jazz and classical to hip-hop and avant-garde—making it more difficult than ever for Academy voters to narrow the field to 15 for Oscar’s shortlist.
Variety examines 16 of the possible choices, in alphabetical order: ‘American Fiction‘ – Laura Karpman Cord Jefferson’s movie—about a Black writer who, as a joke, writes a bad novel that becomes a best seller—has a lead character whose name is Thelonious and whose nickname is Monk.
So, to composer Laura Karpman, fashioning a score in the style of the jazz great was an obvious choice. Much of her score is small-combo, piano-featured jazz, and while she also wrote a massive orchestral and choral score for “The Marvels,” this much smaller but acclaimed film would seem to be her best shot for awards.
She has five Emmys, co-founded the Alliance for Women Film Composers, and was the first female music governor of the Academy, but she has yet to receive an Oscar nomination. ‘Barbie‘ – Mark Ronson, Andrew Wyatt The Grammy-winning songwriter-producers not only supervised many of the songs in the year’s biggest box-office hit, they also composed the music between all those vocals. “We just started to play around and we essentially scored this seven-minute battle scene… then they gave us the opening credits, and we slowly ended up writing more and more music until they were like, ‘you’re scoring the film,'” Ronson told Variety.
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