The Academy Missed Some Of 2025’s Best Film Scores

What do you listen for in a great movie score? An iconic theme, perhaps, or a meaningful leitmotif that ties the film together. Maybe you want something innovative, compositions that make a film feel contemporary as they mine the cutting edge. Or maybe you just want a grand, sweeping throwback that plays every piece of the orchestra like in the good old days.

If you’re a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, you probably want a score so generic it can’t even be heard. This year was a fantastic year for film scores, but you wouldn’t know it by looking at the Oscar nominees. Between Max Richter’s anonymous, self-plagiarizing Hamnet score and Alexandre Desplat’s Frankenstein -sized participation trophy, we have Jerskin Fendrix’s music for Bugonia , a collection of screeching strings as pleasantly atonal and immediately forgettable as the movie they’ve soundtracked. There are some standouts, of course. Ludwig Göransson’s Sinners score freely blends blues, power metal, and turntabling with snatches of Irish folk and fingerstyle Appalachian bluegrass, embodying the kind of transcendent cultural fusionism that Ryan Coogler’s plot sometimes struggles to accomplish; it’s much more exciting (and deserving) than his Oscar-winning work for Oppenheimer. Meanwhile, Johnny Greenwood has constructed a real-deal Hollywood score for One Battle After Another , leveraging the full orchestra for moments of grand-scale impact without ever tipping over into bombast.

It would be easy to rag on the Oscars for its boring taste; I’ve just done it, and I’ll keep going. For one, they have long had a complicated relationship between music and merit. The first Academy Award for Best Original Score was given to the “Columbia Studio Music Department” in 1934, for the opera-set musical romance One Night of Love. For long stretches, the Academy gave out separate awards for musicals and non-musicals, or combined the musical and original song categories. As late as 1998 they still gave out one award for Original Musical or Comedy Score, and another for Original Dramatic Score, implying an innate distinction between the two.