Best Song Oscar Nominees Include Justin Timberlake, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone
This morning, the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences is announcing the nominations for this year’s Oscars. And more than ever before, the Best Original Score category is stocked with artists who came up through the indie and post-rock worlds.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Mica Levi, who did the great score for 2013’s Under The Skin and who still records twitchy postpunk with her band Micachu & The Shapes, is nominated for her score for the movie Jackie. Meanwhile, the spacey German composer Hauschka and Dustin O’Halloran, half of the ambient duo A Winged Victory For The Sullen, are both nominated for their score for Lion; they previously scored a Golden Globe nomination. Micachu, Hauschka, and O’Halloran are up against a trio of more conventional film composers: Nicholas Britell for Moonlight, Thomas Newman for Passengers, and the prohibitive favorite, Justin Hurwitz for La La Land. Pharrell, considered a likely nominee for his work on the Hidden Figures score, was not nominated.
The Best Original Song category includes a few pop titans. Justin Timberlake is nominated for “Can’t Stop This Feeling,” his song from the Trolls soundtrack, while Sting is up for “The Empty Chair,” a song that he and composer J. Ralph wrote for the HBO documentary Jim: The James Foley Story. They’re up against Lin-Manuel Miranda, nominated for the Moana song “How Far I’ll Go,” and two songs from La La Land, “Audition” and “City Of Stars.”
La La Land, it bears mentioning, scored 14 nominations. That puts it in a three-way tie for most nominations of all time, sharing the distinction with All About Eve and Titanic.