The process of choosing “best song” and “best score” for this year’s Academy Awards will be a little more complicated for voters. Revised Oscar rules mandate that the music branch choose 15 pre-nominees in each category, requiring them to see and evaluate all of the eligible works an entire month earlier than usual. This may alter the results and eliminate late-December releases from the race. I discuss this in an analysis story for this week’s Variety. Also this week: individual looks at 13 potential score nominees, including Mary Queen of Scots, A Quiet Place, Green Book, On the Basis of Sex, Widows, Red Sparrow and Fantastic Beasts 2, BlacKkKlansman, Stan & Ollie, Boy Erased, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, If Beale Street Could Talk and Vice.
Tag Archives: Marco Beltrami
Variety’s Music for Screens Summit
Variety, which has been making a much greater effort to cover the Hollywood music scene this year, launched its inaugural Music for Screens Summit on Tuesday, October 30. I was privileged to moderate the score-composer panel, which I dared to declare the most diverse ever — Turkish-born Pinar Toprak (who is starting Captain Marvel), Dutch composer Tom Holkenborg (about to unveil Mortal Engines), Swedish-born Ludwig Goransson (Black Panther), German-Iranian Ramin Djawadi (Game of Thrones), African-American composer Terence Blanchard (BlacKkKlansman) and New Yorker Marco Beltrami (A Quiet Place). It was a wide-ranging discussion, covering everything from diversity issues to film — and, by extension, film scores — becoming part of the ongoing cultural conversation in America. Video of the entire session is here.
This year’s Oscar contenders for best score, song
Every year we try and assess who has the best shot at a nomination for the original-score Oscar. Eight of the 12 profiles in this year’s Variety Oscar-music section are mine: Marco Beltrami, Danny Elfman, Michael Giacchino, Jonny Greenwood, Henry Jackman, Clint Mansell, Thomas Newman and Steven Price. (Colleague Tim Greiving penned the other four: Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard, Gary Yershon, Mark Mothersbaugh.) Tim and I also collaborated on this year’s overview of Best Song possibilities.
Marco Beltrami and “The Homesman”
In preparing to chronicle this year’s batch of Oscar music hopefuls, I stumbled across one of the most interesting and creative approaches to a Western score in some time: composer Marco Beltrami’s experiments to “musicalize” the sounds of wind over the plains for director Tommy Lee Jones’ The Homesman — all created acoustically, not electronically processed as he had done seven years ago in 3:10 to Yuma. We explored this together after a Society of Composers & Lyricists screening of the film on Sunday. (Story to come in Variety. Will post soon.)
The Changing Soundscape of Superhero Movies
… a headline I liked, for a change. This was a really interesting topic thrown me by a Variety editor: How has the music of comic-book movies changed over the years? Can you still do what John Williams did in Superman in 1978? Or does the music need to reflect the darker tone of many contemporary superheroes? Hans Zimmer, Brian Tyler and Marco Beltrami were some of those I interviewed on the subject.
Marco Beltrami, Billion Dollar Composer
Here is a group of stories I wrote for Variety about Marco Beltrami, one of today’s most innovative and sought-after composers for film. Just getting to his Malibu studio was something of an adventure. The main story includes quotes from collaborators ranging from James Mangold and Wes Craven to Tommy Lee Jones, and something of Beltrami himself talking about his journey. I also wrote about his unique studio and his recent, more intimate, scores.