Staff Picks Blog
The 2010 Oscar nominations were announced this week, and in the Original Score category the nominees are: Avatar by James Horner, Fantastic Mr. Fox by Alexandre Desplat, The Hurt Locker by Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders (even though the movie came out in June, the score to The Hurt Locker wasn’t released until the movie started getting award nominations at the end of 2009), Sherlock Holmes by Hans Zimmer, and Up by Michael Giacchino. A sign of the future, perhaps, is that the soundtrack to Up has only been released as an MP3 download. It‘s not available on CD at this time.
It’s interesting to note that all the nominees are veterans in this category. Horner won 2 Oscars for Titanic in 1997 (best score and best song) and has had multiple nominations, including 2 nominations in 1995 for Apollo 13 and Braveheart. Alexandre Desplat has been nominated twice before including last year’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Beltrami was previously nominated for 3:10 to Yuma (2007). Hans Zimmer won an Oscar for his score to The Lion King (1994) and was nominated for Gladiator (2000), The Thin Red Line (1998), and The Prince of Egypt (1998), among others.
Michael Giacchino is the newest kid on the block with one previous nomination in 2008 for Ratatouille. He may be the upstart but he’s already got an impressive body of work. He’s done the scores to the TV series Lost, 2009′s Star Trek, and The Incredibles (2004), and he has the distinction of being the first video game composer to be nominated for an Oscar. He’s already won a Golden Globe for Up and seems a good bet for the Oscar. I’m hoping that will convince the powers that be to release the score on CD.
