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Why The Return of the King Should Be Nominated For An Academy Award
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| Posted By: Al Kaplan, Jonathan Kaplan on December 21, 2003 - 9:00 PM |
Why The Return of the King
Should Be Nominated For An Academy Award
A kind-hearted message from Jon and
Al Kaplan
To anyone who is going to be voting for the 2003 Academy Award nominees
in the Original Score category, or to anyone who has a friend who is
going to be voting:
We'd like to put in a good word or two for Howard Shore’s The Return of the King. We confess
that we’ve never put much stock in the Academy Awards—especially the
music categories. But somehow we still care about film music enough to
want to see the best scores represented in this international forum.
And we’re afraid that for a variety of reasons, ROTK may not be nominated. This
would be a travesty considering that it is far and away the best score
of the year, and also the concluding movement to one of the greatest
musical achievements of all time -- a grand, near-12-hour opera written
to film.
If nominated, it’s very unlikely ROTK
would actually take the Oscar, considering Shore already won for Fellowship. John Williams’ Empire Strikes Back was far
superior to Star Wars (and
widely considered the best score of all time). The music branch
recognized Williams’ achievement with a nomination, whereas the general
body of Academy members saw the music as simply more of the same,
giving the Oscar to Michael Gore for
Fame. Similarly, there’s no easy way to convince all the
non-musician Academy voters how remarkable ROTK really is -- where ideas,
textures and thematic seeds from Fellowship
and Two Towers return,
further or now fully developed. So while ROTK may not win, that doesn’t
change the fact that it needs to be nominated.
Here’s a question: Why should we expect anyone to ever take film music
seriously if film composers themselves can’t come together to recognize
such a staggering achievement in their own field? And here’s another
question: Do the members of the music branch think of film music as an
art? It hurts to have to even say all this stuff, but we’ve actually
heard off-the-record comments bashing Shore’s work on this trilogy.
That makes us question a lot about the industry, even when the comments
are coming from jealous, terrible composers who are stuck scoring
horrible action movies or kiddie flicks. The inherent problem with what
we’re writing now is that we’re essentially appealing to these very
people.
No matter how many times you watch ROTK
or listen to the album (which presents a mere fraction of the music
Shore wrote for the film), you will find something new -- sometimes a
seamless combination of two themes, or perhaps a fragment of a passage
from an earlier film reinvented for a related scene in ROTK. There’s no throw-away writing
here. If you put in the time and immerse yourself in this music, you
will be rewarded beyond words.
Also, do not be swayed or confused by last year’s “no sequel score”
fiasco (which may have cost Shore a nomination for Two Towers). It’s okay to nominate
a sequel score. And as composers know, it’s often more challenging to
effectively expand existing materials than it is to start a score from
scratch. Shore has done this to unparalleled extents with his Lord of the Rings scores.
To think that something like The
Last Samurai (which amounts to about six minutes of music
repeated across a two-and-a-half hour film) will be nominated and
probably even win this year’s award is a sad thought, but not nearly as
sad as the thought of Return of the
King not getting nominated at all.
MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com
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