It’s ironic this happened today considering just yesterday I was putting a few of the final touches on the new RopeofSilicon.com that is about to launch very, very soon while I decided to give the ol’ Dark Knight score a listen. As it was playing I realized once again, there are a few tracks on that thing that really get your motor running. The opening track, “Why So Serious?”, is an excellent starting point but tracks like “I’m Not a Hero” and “Like a Dog Chasing Cars” really catch your ear while listening. Unfortunately, said score has been disqualified by the Academy music branch and won’t be in the running for Original Score at the 2009 Oscars.
The move mirrors a similar decision disqualifying the score for Batman Begins of which composers Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, also collaborated on. The catch, as reported by Variety, citing “sources inside the committee” is that the big issue was the fact there were five names listed as composers on the music cue sheet, the official studio document that specifies every piece of music (along with its duration and copyright owner) in the film.
Apparently the decision of whether to include the score for The Dark Knight in the running or not involved four hours of discussion over the past two executive committee meetings, but apparently the fact more than 60%, but less than 70%, of the score was credited to Zimmer and Howard was an issue. The unfortunate thing here is the decision to include the three additional names – music editor Alex Gibson, ambient music designer Mel Wesson and composer Lorne Balfe – was a way of financially rewarding parts of the music team who helped make the overall work successful. I guess karma doesn’t always work for awards, but with The Dark Knight now only $2.4 million away from over $1 billion in box-office receipts I would say karma has a way of working things out.
However, this year is a strange year for scores. I haven’t personally heard many I liked outside of Rachel Portman’s score for The Duchess, which I continue to listen to a lot and get continually frustrated at how short it is. Other than that I am expecting something amazing from Alexandre Desplat for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as well as Thomas Newman for Revolutionary Road and Howard Shore for Doubt. It’s a category, like many others, still waiting for the top dogs to come out of their cages.
