Jon Burlingame It’s anybody’s game: this is a rare year when any of the five original-score nominees could win the Oscar. Two of the nominees are previous winners, two more are past nominees; only one is a newcomer, and it’s a three-man ensemble.
Four films are period pieces: an admired German-language war film, a character study set against the Irish civil war, an epic of late 1920s Hollywood, and a coming-of-age story for a young filmmaker in the ‘50s and ‘60s; the fifth is a wild, anarchic tale of a Chinese American family that saves the universe.
And the nominees are: “All Quiet on the Western Front” For this adaptation of the Erich Maria Remarque classic, German composer Volker Bertelmann used his great-grandmother’s turn-of-the-century harmonium, a pump organ whose carefully mic’d interior noises (“the breathing, the air, the wooden cracklings”) sounded to him like “a war machine.” Bertelmann’s scary three-note “destruction” motive — which reminded director Edward Berger of Led Zeppelin — permeates the entire score, and his music for the naive soldier Paul was filtered to emulate the “muffled” sound he might have experienced in trenches surrounded by gunfire and explosions.
This is Bertelmann’s second Oscar nomination, and his BAFTA win on Sunday may bode well for Oscar. “Babylon” Composer Justin Hurwitz (who won song and score Oscars for 2016’s “La La Land”) reunited with director Damien Chazelle for this three-hour Hollywood fever dream.
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