On We March: The 83rd Academy Award Best Original Score Nominees (and Winner)
by Aldrin Calimlim

The King’s Speech, Alexandre Desplat. Oddly, the track titled The King’s Speech in Alexandre Desplat’s splendid score for the Harvey Weinstein-powered, quadruple Oscar-winning The King’s Speech is not the piece played over the climactic scene, where His Majesty King Colin Firth is standing behind an ancient microphone and delivering King George VI’s first wartime speech over the airwaves, replete with dramatic pauses and tricks of elocution prescribed by Lionel Logue as portrayed by Geoffrey Rush, ever a servant of regal films; an adaptation of the second movement of Beethoven’s seventh symphony, renamed Speaking Unto Nations and conducted by Terry Davies, was used for that purpose. Desplat’s The King Speech was appropriated instead for the film’s opening scene, which focuses on the then Prince Albert, Duke of York’s closing speech for an exhibition at a stadium filled with spectators. Initially inviting and imbued with sophisticated whimsy reminiscent of the composer’s brilliant work in Fantastic Mr. Fox (one could just imagine Roald Dahl’s canine character blithely skipping along to the track’s first half), it eventually segues to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows territory with an unsettling near-silence of strings that sound almost like a cry for help coupled with intermittent attempts by a piano at giving solace as poor Bertie in front of his subjects struggles with his bloody stammer. But named as it was after the film, The King’s Speech is not the most memorable of Desplat’s compositions for The King’s Speech. That distinction belongs to The Rehearsal, the elegantly endearing music (audio file for streaming above) accompanying the public speaker and the speech therapist’s rehearsal not for the king’s speech but for the coronation oath. Superbly modulated to evoke the growing bond of (to borrow the compound word of director Tom Hooper) man-love between the two central characters, it’s but one of the many excellent pieces of modern film music from one of the most prolific and most eloquent film composers working today. 

Inception, Hans Zimmer. Subtlety has never been Hans Zimmer’s strongest suit. Especially in his recent compositions for Hollywood blockbusters, he’s been one to favor convoluted confluences of musical onomatopoeias over consistently gentle sequences of sounds. Many are averse to Zimmer’s persistent methodical assaults to their auditory canals and, by extension, to their amygdalae (you know, those groups of nerves responsible for emotional reactions, presumably including the ones you feel while watching a film with wall-to-wall music). But this predilection for systematic amplification played to his score’s advantage in Guy Ritchie’s jocular Sherlock Holmes, where strings and percussions banter vigorously amid wild goose chases and bromantic misadventures, and, to a more palpable but altogether humorless extent, in Christopher Nolan’s self-serious Inception, where, as exemplified by Dream Within A Dream, sound waves crash on sound waves crash on sound waves crash on sound waves, some bearing the faintest hints of softness but most others reaching decibels so high that Edith Piaf might have been roused from her grave as though only from a dream. 

127 Hours, A. R. Rahman. Kinetic is probably the adjective most commonly used to describe Danny Boyle’s directing style. In telling stories ranging from drug addiction in Trainspotting to childhood innocence in Millions, he refuses to deal with merely talking heads or merely grunting zombies. Motion is what stimulates his mind’s eye. Even when his characters are required to be and remain sedentary, as in the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? segments of Slumdog Millionaire, Boyle presents them and their surroundings in ways that are anything but static. Even when his central character is stuck in a crevasse with his arm held down by a friggin’ boulder, as in the James Franco vehicle 127 Hours, Boyle is relentless in his signature kineticism, buoyed by, among others, a good part of the scoring efforts of A. R. Rahman, his Academy Award-winning Slumdog collaborator. 127 Hours opens with Free Blood’s fantastic and athletic Never Hear Surf Music Again booming and thumping over a split screen of throngs of people in contrast with Franco as lone canyoneer Aron Ralston just hours before the grueling extent of time of the title. Enjoy the tonal energy of this song while you can, for soon after it is the somewhat forced warmth of Rahman’s The Canyon, which sounds like a cross between a lullaby and the more temperate parts of the Marlboro theme. Beyond that everything else in the soundtrack to Ralston’s Sisyphean task is determinedly pensive, save for a mocking interlude by Bill Withers and his Lovely Day and the trilogy of “liberation” tracks from Rahman. Marked by repetitive and abrasive electric guitar phrases gradually mixed with jubilant orchestral sounds, Liberation Begins, Liberation in a Dream, and the climactic, self-amputative Liberation are perfectly in sync with the kinetic riffs of this gross, yes, but ultimately inspiring nature documentary about the fiercest animal on the planet. Cue Sigur Ros’ hopelandic Festival and Dido and Rahman’s ethereal If I Rise. 

How to Train Your Dragon, John Powell. John Powell holds the unenviable distinction of composing the incidental music for two of the worst films of the last decade, The Adventures of Pluto Nash and Gigli. But never you mind that; an awful film can have a not awful score, after all (e.g. James Newton Howard’s for M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village). Most recently Powell banged out the orchestration for DreamWorks’ most ambitious production to date, How to Train Your Dragon, and his work on that film — his sixth for the animation studio — alone exonerates him from any lapse in judgment he might have committed in the past, under the influence of a quick paycheck or otherwise. Alongside his fellow Academy Award nominee, True Grit cinematographer Roger Deakins, who served as visual consultant for directors Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, Powell was one of the accomplished professionals hired to help make How to Train Your Dragon what it ultimately hatched into: one of the best animated films in recent memory, even surpassing, some would argue, the achievement of a certain third toy story. His immense contribution to the film cannot be denied. Between This is Berk — its battle horns, warpipes, and muscular male voices introduce the recurring themes of the score as well as the setting and hero of the story — and Coming Back Around — it reflects on the epic journey embarked upon by the hero, a little Viking called Hiccup, and his newfound friend, a dragon he named Toothless, first with a tender hardanger ballad then with a celebration of drum beats and brass zephyrs — Powell turns out two more tracks which are emblematic not only of the spirit of adventure and friendship championed by the film but also of his real, understated talent. Test Drive, whose head and tail are adapted liberally into Coming Back Around, is a sonic representation of Hiccup and Toothless’ maiden flight together. Bisected by a sudden pull-up and free fall of wind and percussion but eventually reclaimed by a triumphant gliding and flapping of the same, it successfully translates and highlights the sense of danger and exhilaration that is at the heart of the rider and the beast’s eye-opening exploits. But it’s one of the few departures from the score’s inclination towards stereoscopic whizbangs that pitches Powell at his most exquisite. In Forbidden Friendship, he builds up an atmosphere of innocence and taking chances with layers upon layers of delicate bars and keys. With the track’s dominant xylophones and subtle shakers, he amplifies the nearly wordless scene where boy and dragon experience their first true physical and emotional contact. It’s an event so magical and improbable that only a climactic divine female chorus conducted by Powell could give it justice. Only the able John Powell, his association with infamous film flops notwithstanding, could. 

The Social Network, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. After nine pages of an all but one-sided, high-speed conversation between the fictional Mark Zuckerberg and his date, the no less fictional Erica Albright, in the original screenplay for The Social Network, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin introduced Paul Young’s Love of the Common People and suggested it be used as the background music for the film’s post-cold open sequence and Mark’s post-breakup shock and denial. But Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor and frequent collaborator Atticus Ross had a better song in mind to accompany Mark’s bruised ego and the film’s opening credits neatly set in Futura, with corners and edges as sharp as the antihero’s inward pain. It’s aptly called Hand Covers Bruise. Scattered throughout its continuously discordant strings whose nervous oscillations are jarring from the get-go are instances of doleful but more audible piano tritones — ambient dissonance coexisting with but not quite giving in to pulses of rhythm. Like its cousin, the self-descriptively titled penultimate track in the official soundtrack album, The Gentle Hum of Anxiety, it’s a troubled transmission of enlightenment as signal and angst as noise. Its signal-to-noise ratio, then, as in the synthesis of sounds within social networks online and off, is a variable uncertainty. Love of the Common People might have been more pronounced in its acoustic and semantic sarcasm, an effect which would not at all have been undesirable given the film’s powerful undercurrent of irony, but Reznor and Ross’s instrumental Hand Covers Bruise proved the wiser choice. That The Social Network was bookended by it and The Beatles’ Baby, You’re a Rich Man underscores its thematic import.