The Oscar for Best Original Score is a highly sought-after and hotly contested category every year at the Academy Awards. This year was no different, with new contenders appearing for the first time, competing against the legends of the game. John Williams has broken his own record for the most nominations for any single living person, while Jerskin Fendrix makes a splash with a nomination for his very first feature film at just 29. But it was the most talked-about film composer of the moment who ended up taking home the top prize: Oppenheimer‘s Ludwig Göransson. Without further ado, here is your guide to this year’s winner, along with the other nominations for this year’s Oscars for Best Original Score.
Winner of the Oscar for Best Original Score 2024
Oppenheimer (Ludwig Göransson)
Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson has become one of the biggest names in the film music world in recent years, thanks to his work on films including Creed, Marvel’s Black Panther, Christopher Nolan’s Tenet and Disney+’s Star Wars series, The Mandalorian. As well as scoring some of the biggest films of the last few years, Göransson has worked as a record producer with Childish Gambino on several of his albums. This year he has already clinched the other two major awards for film scoring, winning the BAFTA and Golden Globe for his Oppenheimer score.
Göransson chose to place the violin at the heart of his score, thanks to its versatility and ability to ‘go from the most romantic melodic tone and within a split second turn the tremolo into something neurotic and manic’, he told Variety. As is typical of many of his scores, he uses synthesizers to enhance or evolve organic recorded instrumental sounds. The film’s director Christopher Nolan suggested the prominent use of the violin, because he thinks of it as a ‘fretless instrument’, much like the film’s protagonist, J Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb.
Nominees for the Oscar for Best Original Score 2024
American Fiction (Laura Karpman)
Laura Karpman receives her very first Oscar nomination with her score to American Fiction. The film is a comedy-drama based on the 2001 novel Erasure Percival Everett, which sees a frustrated novelist write a satire of a stereotypical ‘Black’ book, which is mistaken for serious literature and heralded by the white liberal elite. Karpman’s jazz-infused score takes its lead from the lead character’s name. ‘The character’s name is Thelonious Ellison, right? His nickname is Monk. So you have to acknowledge jazz,’ Kapman told Vanity Fair. When she was working on the score, Kapman imagined the protagonist actor Jeffrey Wright’s voice and dialogue as an instrument. Kapman described Wright’s voice as being ‘like a familiar tenor saxophone’. Her score features multiple saxophones, pianos, flute and bass, with specific moments written in to allow for improvisation from the players.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (John Williams)
John Williams has yet again broken his own record for the most Oscar nominations in history across any category, with 54 Oscar nominations to his name. The 92-year-old composer has previously been nominated in this category for two other films in the Indiana Jones franchise: Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1985) and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1990). This new score for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny is as dramatic and colourful as all Williams’s other scores (see where we pitched it in these rankings of the Indiana Jones soundtracks, worst to best), with familiar Indiana Jones themes presented alongside thrilling new musical ideas. There’s also a particularly good recording available of the soundtrack, with top LA musicians from the Hollywood Studio Symphony playing alongside the Berlin Philharmonic’s principal horn player Sarah Willis and top international violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter.
Read our complete list of John Williams’s Oscar nominations here.
Killers of the Flower Moon (Robbie Robertson)
Robbie Robertson has been posthumously nominated for his score to Killers of the Flower Moon, having died in August last year. The film’s director Martin Scorsese dedicated the film to the late composer’s memory, as it was the final film the pair worked on together after a decades-long collaborative partnership. In Robertson’s early career, he toured as Bob Dylan’s lead guitarist, as well as developing a varied career as a guitarist and songwriter. His film music career was deeply intertwined with Martin Scorsese, with whom he worked on for the scores for The Irishman (2019), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), Gangs of New York (2002) and Raging Bull (1980).
In Scorsese’s tribute to Robertson for Rolling Stone, he referenced their collaboration on Killers of the Flower Moon, a western crime drama set in 1920s Oklahoma. ‘For the moment when Leo (DiCaprio) drops off Lily (Gladstone) from his cab at her house, Robbie came back with a theme driven by guitar, bass, harmonica – dangerous and fleshy. More than I asked for. It helped drive the whole picture. There had to be another theme, expansive and bold, something that would match the scale of the landscape itself, the prairies and the hills. He came back with a gusher of sound, to match the oil shooting up from the earth… coyotes and wolf calls.’ Robertson’s score is rich and evocative, matching the drama of the landscapes and action playing out on screen.
Poor Things (Jerskin Fendrix)
It’s the first – of likely, many – Oscar nominations for Best Original Score for Jerskin Fendrix, the composer behind Yorgos Lanthimos’s film Poor Things. While the music of Lanthimos’s films has always played an integral role in building atmosphere and shaping the worlds he creates with his strong visual aesthetic, this is the first time he has worked with a composer rather than using pre-existing works of classical music. It’s also a first for Fendrix, who hasn’t worked on a feature film before, but has cut his teeth in the pop music world, working with bands associated with The Windmill pub in Brixton, such as Black Midi and Black Country, News Road. His experimental score for Poor Things blends traditional live instruments with strange synthesized effects to bend sounds in unusual, unexpected ways.
Interested in watching the Oscar nominations for Best Original Score 2024? Find out where to stream the films here.