The Bad and Good Minuses and Pluses
Before we get to our scheduled MP3, Oscar…
Best score: Giacchino didn’t win. Haven’t seen Atonement, so can’t say anything bad about Dario.
Best Song: Glenn Hasard and Marketa Iriglova were very inspirational winners, enough so that they brought her out again after the orchestra cut her off. I think Disney missed out on getting Giacchino nominated for best song “Le Festin” in Ratatouille rather than 3 vote-splitting songs from Enchanted. Greenwood, as expected, wasn’t even nominated (supposedly it relied too much on pre-existing material).
There Will Be Blood won cinematography and (duh) actor. Daniel-Day Lewis was almost hyper-articulate in his speech and made a nice British duo with presenter Helen Mirren. It was a Coen Brothers year for sure, one of those things that are a long time in the making like Scorsese’s wins of last year.
And as promised…
Anthem for the Earnest (Bad Plus cover) - Christopher O’Riley
February 26th, 2008 at 4:07 am
I don’t remember anything about the Atonement score, other than the inclusion of typewriter sounds near the beginning that might have been interesting, if not for how annoyingly intrusive they were. It probably included a lot of swelling strings though.
Question: When you can’t remember anything about a film’s score, is that a good thing or a bad thing?
February 26th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Well, the cliche is that if don’t hear it, then that means it’s working. Max Steiner replied by saying “If you don’t hear it, what good is it?” Of course, he was famous for his “wallpaper” scoring so he’s not necessarily objective about it.
My feeling is that you have to rewatch to truly get it…the Ratatouille score just deepens whenever I rewatch and the way the themes are weaved together are just masterful even as they are often “hidden” but help create an emotional arc. Same thing with Greenwood’s score for There Will Be Blood (yes, there were themes in there!).