Jon Burlingame In an ideal world, the Academy’s music branch would watch all the movies and decide which five have met the criteria for excellence in musical scoring. But we all know that many other factors come into play: Was the film commercially successful? Is the composer already popular with his or her peers? Have voters been swayed by an effective campaign? In fact, dozens of fine scores have been ignored by the Academy over the years. And a handful have gone down in history as among the overlooked gems of the past eight decades: David Raksin’s haunting music for the murder mystery starring Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney was, by far, the most popular score of the 1940s at 20th Century Fox.
