Notes in the Dark

This morning’s Oscar nominations were fairly predictable (with one regrettable omission):

Gustavo Santaolalla, Brokeback Mountain
Alberto Iglesias, The Constant Gardener
John Williams, Memoirs of a Geisha
John Williams, Munich
Dario Marianelli, Pride & Prejudice

Predictable in that two worthy Williams scores got nominated (doesn’t this happen a lot, unfortunately canceling each other out?) and some composers people have never heard of, with scores coincidentally attached to films with a lot of nominations. I’m not sure why people get all hot and bothered over the Oscar nominations. It’s very clear that there’s a formula behind nominations — a very small handful of composers (such as a Williams or a Newman) can get nominated regardless of the film’s “hotness” in the Oscar race, while the rest of the nominations are reserved for scores that are attached to Oscar frontrunners. (Even my own favorite composers have been beneficiaries of this formula in years past.) So it seems fairly straightforward, the whys and wherefores of Oscar noms.

That said, the wailing commences every year and I guess I must join in. My disappointment this year is over James Newton Howard not getting a nod for King Kong. I’m not really into JNH, but he is good, and I find whenever I hear a score by him there is always some moment or other that seems a standout. He almost makes me forget my indifference to American film scoring. You would think Kong stood an outside chance to get a technical/arts nomination like Original Score, but I guess Peter Jackson is not on anyone’s reward list this year.

Long ago, in the previous incarnation of this blog, I blogged at length on the politics of film score awards, and asked the question if there is any such thing as a “real” film score award.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen this John Barry-scored movie the whole way through, even though it used to play on HBO all the time when I was a kid. It’s a quintessentially Seventies updating of the Robin Hood legend, with Sean Connery as an old-fart Robin and Audrey Hepburn as an aging Marian, together again with the gang for one last stab at glory in Sherwood Forest.

It’s also a pretty awful movie of a pretty good concept — cheesy and underdone (how could England look so ugly?), with logic holes big enough to drive a truck through. However, the semi-famous last scene is pretty cool (spoiler alert): sensing time and fate closing in on them, Maid Marian slips wounded Robin a poison mickey and quaffs some herself, and they have a long and fairly romantic death scene. I loved this when I was a kid, because it all seemed so serious and grownup, and the music was so pretty, so that meant it had to be moving and meaningful, even if I didn’t really get it. And then, as he’s dying, Robin shoots an arrow out the window! Oh, how beautiful.

Well, I’m all grown up now and unfortunately the rest of the movie is just bad filmmaking. Aside from John Barry’s very unique gift for absolutely gorgeous slow melodies, I actually found the underscore kind of disconcertingly undramatic, even self-absorbed. There’s a scene near the end where Robin and his men are in Sherwood Forest, preparing for their final confrontation, and everyone is doing all sorts of different things (women sewing, men training) and clearly feeling different emotions, but the score doesn’t seem to acknowledge this in any vivid way, and the dynamic range of the music seems very narrow.

Whatever the criticism though, even as I sat through this movie I waited to see if the last scene was as I remembered it, and it was. Really, this is what film music is ultimately about - the great moments, and making ordinary moments seem great.

I returned to film music Internet consciousness in late 2005 only to discover that Film Score Monthly had just died. This was sad news, even though I never had been a subscriber to the “new” FSM - the well-produced one with the color covers. Call me old school, but I just missed the fannishness and exuberance of the old FSM too much. But when I heard it was going to an online version, I figured what the hey, I can pony up $4.95 a month again. We’ll see.

I was surprised and momentarily miffed, though, to see in one of their online articles something that I thought didn’t happen any more — barely disguised quoting from online resources. Namely, mine. Here I had just paid $4.95 to see my own crappy writing staring back at me. However, the author was very apologetic and gentlemanly, as film score folks usually are (which is why I keep coming back again and again), and it was really no big deal.

But I had to laugh again just the other day when I went over to the very snazzy official Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire website and they had stolen from my Patrick Doyle bio too. That definitely tops Carnegie Hall stealing from it! And the many others who have. It has been hilarious to see this humble little bio capsule making its way across the Internet since 1995 when I first put that site up; everyone faithfully reproducing the immortal comma (”Patrick Doyle is best known, as a film composer,”) and — even more glaringly — citing The Butterfly’s Hoof. Somehow, I doubt these folks are copying that from the liner notes to the Queen Mother concert — which is where I stole it from.