Oscar noms for Music categories in

Music (Score)
Babel - Gustavo Santaolalla
The Good German - Thomas Newman
Notes On A Scandal - Philip Glass
Pan's Labyrinth - Javier Navarette
The Queen - Alexandre Desplat

Music (Song)
"I Need To Wake Up" - An Inconvenient Truth
"Listen" - Dreamgirls
"Love You I Do" - Dreamgirls
"Our Town" - Cars
"Patience" - Dreamgirls

Score one for the team

The once-solitary job of film scoring is becoming a collaborative effort.
By Jeff Bond
Jan 5, 2007

(via The Hollywood Reporter) As most filmmakers will attest, making movies is an immensely collaborative process. While producers, directors and writers often end up getting the lion's share of the credit when a film succeeds, the reality is that great movies are never the work of one person. The same cannot be said of film scoring. The life of a film composer is frequently a solitary one, with weeks, months and sometimes years spent painstakingly writing and rewriting the cues and themes that can bring a movie to life.

Lately, however, the traditional view of a film composer slaving away all by his or her lonesome has changed, and it's more and more common to see multiple composers on a movie receive screen credit, whether they start out as composing teams or when extra hands are brought in to help out late in the process.

This year boasts a number of high-profile collaborations, some between composers and artists who might be considered outside the music world altogether -- namely, directors. Read more...

Thinking in Colors and Textures, Then Writing in Music

By JON BURLINGAME
Published: January 7, 2007
(From The New York Times)

The trouble with Hollywood film scores these days is that so many sound as if you have heard them before. That’s less the fault of composers than of directors, who commonly prescore their films with temporary music during editing, then frequently expect the final score to emulate that “temp track.” So originality, when it occurs, can be startling, as when American audiences first heard the enchanting waltzes of Girl With a Pearl Earring in 2003, or the fairy-tale flutes and surging orchestral drama of Birth in 2004.

Both scores were the work of Alexandre Desplat, a 45-year-old Paris composer who also scored Syriana in 2005. His music for The Queen and The Painted Veil has raised his name as a potential Oscar nominee this season.

He wrote and recorded the score for The Queen in just three weeks, after Stephen Frears, the film’s director, decided another composer’s score wouldn’t work. “The first thing I said to Stephen was, ‘It’s very tricky,’ ” Mr. Desplat said on a recent visit to Los Angeles. “You can’t go too dark, too suspenseful, too funny or too sweet. What I felt was necessary was music with some grandeur and elegance, but still wit. It’s a witty movie.” Read more (subscription req'd)...

"Movie and music: It's a package deal"

Director Tom Tykwer knows the score -- because he wrote it. His latest film is "Perfume."
By Richard Knight Jr., Chicago Tribune

"There are a lot of renowned collaborations between film directors and their favorite composers — Steven Spielberg and John Williams, Alfred Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann, Tim Burton and Danny Elfman. But it's rare to find a film director who also serves as his own composer. Clint Eastwood is one; another is German-born director Tom Tykwer, whose latest movie, "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer," opened in L.A. last week". Read more...