Classic Notes in the Dark: Awards Season

(This is a repost/rescue of an old post from the previous incarnation of this blog. Since it’s getting to be that time of year again.)

It’s awards season again. Time for the different film music awards… and their agendas.

Is there such a thing as a really “real” film score award? One which is really about the best score (and best-scored film) of the year, the most outstanding work by dedicated career composers, and suchlike? If there is one, most would agree that the Oscars probably ain’t it. The Oscar film score category has a long and notorious history, which I won’t attempt to describe. The only question really answered by the Academy in its score nominations is, How Shall We Reward This Studio With One More Nomination? Unless, of course, the composer is Alan Menken. (It seems like a very long time ago now that Alan Menken was the bane of all score fans come Oscar time. How times change.)

For decades, the only alternative to the Academy Awards for annual recognition of scoring in this country (in the mainstream film community, that is, not ASCAP) has been the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Since 1976, the LAFCA has given out Best Music awards — as well as a “runner-up” award — to career film composers (Bernard Herrmann, John Williams, Howard Shore, Elliot Goldenthal, to name a few), to slumming concert composers (Phillip Glass, Toru Takemitsu), to dabblers (Carmine Coppola), as well as to flavors of the month (Giorgio Moroder, Tan Dun, and James Horner and the Busboys). And in one astonishing run during the early ’90s, they gave an unprecedented three awards to Zbigniew Preisner — for his work on seven films. (I guess that makes Preisner the Alan Menken of the LAFCA…)

Because it’s not as if the LAFCA doesn’t play favorites, or have an agenda. But the awards have been given out long enough for the agenda to have changed. It appears that during the early years of the awards, during the late Seventies, that the awards reflected more closely the tastes, or the tastelessness, of the Academy: the winners included John Williams for Star Wars, Carmine Coppola for The Black Stallion, Giorgio Moroder for Midnight Express, and Bernard Herrmann for Taxi Driver. During the 1980s, however, the LAFCA got adventurous with their music awards, citing composers and scores that Oscar wouldn’t have touched — Glass for Koyaanisqatsi, Ry Cooder for The Long Riders, Bill Lee for Do the Right Thing.

By the time the ’90s rolled around, the LAFCA’s agenda was pretty clear, at least where film music was concerned: anti-Hollywood, anti-blockbuster, and even anti-Western. Orchestral scores were out; ethnic and exotic (or just plain weird, in the case of Howard Shore’s Ed Wood) were in. So it was a great decade for Ryuichi Sakamoto (who won twice, for The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky), Phillip Glass (Kundun), Patrick Doyle (A Little Princess) and Tan Dun (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). And, of course, Zbigniew Preisner.

But LAFCA isn’t completely elitist; for example, the surprising runner-up for Best Music in 1997 was none other than Horner’s Titanic. In 2001, Howard Shore received his second LAFCA for The Lord of the Rings. It’s too early to tell whether this selection reflects a vote against Hollywood (i.e., for Peter Jackson more than for Shore) or for the Big Orchestral Score. In any case, I don’t believe that even an “alternative” annual film awards such as LAFCA are immune from using the score award to further the recognition of a film or director, or overall political mindset, rather than of scoring work itself. (By the way, check out this very revealing expose of the National Board of Review, which should give you an idea of the internal politics of the film awards industry. Somebody Talked!)