The morning has arrived, and this year's Oscar nominations are finally in the books. This is a music website, though you can obviously feel free to talk about Delroy Lindo finally getting an Oscar nomination or whatever in the comments section. As always, this year's acting nominations give us plenty of music stuff to discuss.
Let's start off with the big news: Yes, Diane Warren has once again been nominated for Best Original Score. Warren got her 17th Oscar nomination in the Best Original Song category. She has never won the award, and she won't win it this year either. Some iconic Warren songs got Oscar nominations in the distant past, but now she's always just up for end-credits ballads for movies that nobody has ever heard of. This time around, the nominated song is "Dear Me," sung by Kesha and included in the documentary Diane Warren: Relentless, which may or may not exist specifically to earn Warren this 17th nomination.
This time, Warren will almost certainly be defeated by "Golden," the massive HUNT/X hit from the Kpop Demon Hunters soundtrack. That song already won the Golden Globe, and you'd be a fool to bet against it in this year's Oscar race. Kpop Demon Hunters is also up for Best Animated Film, and it'll probably win that, too.
If there's a second-place contender, it's probably "I Lied To You," the song that Miles Caton sang in Sinners. R&B legend Raphael Saadiq co-wrote it with composer Ludwig Göransson. This is the second nomination for Saadiq after the one he earned for Mary J. Blige's Mudbound song "Mighty River." Göransson already has two wins in the Best Original Score category, and he was nominated in this category for Rihanna's Black Panther: Wakanda Forever song "Lift Me Up."
Nick Cave and the National's Bryce Dessner are also Oscar nominees for "Train Dreams," which Cave sang over the end credits of the same name. Both Cave and Dessner have done plenty of film work before, but this is the first Oscar nomination for both. It's also the first nomination for UK composer Nicholas Pike, who's up for "Sweet Dreams Of Joy," from the opera documentary Viva Verdi! Snubs include the two new Wicked: For Good songs, Nine Inch Nails' "As Alive As You Need Me To Be," Ed Sheeran's "Drive," and Billy Idol's "Dying To Live," all of which made the Oscar shortlist.
In the Best Original Score category, the big news, at least for me, is that Daniel Lopatin, aka Oneohtrix Point Never, did not get nominated for his ridiculously cool Marty Supreme score. What does he have to do? What is it going to take? Instead, this year's nominees include past winners Ludwig Göransson and Alexandre Desplat, for Sinners and Frankenstein respectively. Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood, who already had two nominations, gets another one for One Battle After Another, while Jerskin Fendrix, previously nominated for Poor Things, has another nod for Bugonia. The only first-time nominee is Max Richter for Hamnet.
Bryce Dessner (Train Dreams), Hildur Guðnadóttir (Hedda), and Hans Zimmer (F1) are among the heavyweights who made the Best Original Score shortlist but didn't get nominations. I can move past any of those easily, but they really did my boy Daniel Lopatin dirty with this one. Göransson won the Golden Globe. He will probably get his third Oscar, and he'll probably deserve it. But in the absence of Lopatin, my favorite nomination is probably Fendrix's incredibly cool Bugonia score.
R&B great Teyana Taylor got her much-deserved and much-expected One Battle After Another nomination, and she'll probably win the award. She's really the only musician in any of the non-music categories, but we all love Ethan Hawke right? He's up for his role as songwriter Lorenz Hart in Blue Moon. Good for him. Sinners, which is really a music movie, is this year's leader with 16 nominations, followed by One Battle After Another with 14. Also, F1 is up for Best Picture? What the fuck is that all about?
You can see the full list of nominees at Variety. This year's Conan O'Brien-hosted Oscars go down 3/15, and they'll air on ABC and stream on Hulu.
