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Review: How to score an Oscar?In soundtracks, it's John Williams vs. everybody elseBy Porter Anderson  John Williams' score for Steven Spielberg's "Munich" is one of the composer's two nominations in the 78th Academy Awards. RELATEDFILM SCORE NOMINEES Nominees for outstanding film score in the 78th annual Academy Awards The 78th annual Academy Awards show airs live at 8 p.m. ET on Sunday, March 5 on ABC. SPECIAL REPORT
YOUR E-MAIL ALERTSATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- For composer John Williams, getting into a cummerbund Sunday night will mean buckling up for a familiar ride. His Academy Award nominations for "Munich" and "Memoirs of a Geisha" are his 44th and 45th. As the Associated Press' David Germain points out, this puts five-time Oscar winner Williams on the other side of Alfred Newman's previous record of 43 score nominations. Only Walt Disney is said to have come-hithered the golden figurine more, with 59 nominations. And the three rivals are relative newcomers in comparison with Williams, who has won original score Oscars five times -- for "Schindler's List" (1993), "E.T." (1983), "Star Wars" (1977), "Jaws" (1976) "Fiddler on the Roof" (1971). A year in which the red carpet makes a bright-line divide -- between a proven leader and relatively new talents, between the established 74-year-old patriarch of modern tradition and three less-encumbered voices -- is a good moment to consider what makes a film score significant. 'Brokeback'"Brokeback Mountain" holds the spot on the Oscar ticket as what can be considered a composite score, a musical soundtrack that brings together the work of several artists, styles, eras, orchestrations and, most importantly for the purpose, effects. Santaolalla has been picking up a mixed but highly honorable bag of nominations and awards for his score this year. The winner last year of Argentina's Silver Condor award for his "Diarios de motocicleta" ("Motorcycle Diaries"), for example, picked up a Golden Globe this year for one of the "Brokeback" songs, "A Love That Will Never Grow Old." Santaolalla wrote the music, Bernie Taupin wrote the lyrics and Emmylou Harris sings it. But it's designed to fit right in with Willie Nelson's rendition of Bob Dylan's "He Was a Friend of Mine" and Linda Ronstadt's doing of the Buddy Holly anthem "It's So Easy (To Fall in Love)." In other words, this is composition as near-camouflage, a way of creating rich new material (Santaolalla's guitar interludes are as simple as a sunset and easily as beautiful) and standing it up beside artfully rendered "found" work that will telegraph things the audience either knows or thinks it knows. A cool look at the reverse: Willie Nelson, whose heroes have always been cowboys, of course, was apparently so cheered by the success of "Brokeback" that on Valentine's Day he released on iTunes something called "Cowboys Are Frequently, Secretly (Fond of Each Other)." The song, written in 1981 by Ned Sublette, had been in the closet until the cohesion of a new and popular film release triggered the logic of some airplay. 'Prejudice'Moving from a composite score toward the other end of the spectrum, stop next at "Pride & Prejudice." Marianelli has the good fortune to have pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet at the keyboard when needed. And that's the English Chamber Orchestra you hear in bright incidental music, sometimes led by a single fiddle in a sweet retelling of Henry Purcell's Rondeau from "Abdelazer" (in the score called "A Postcard to Henry Purcell") and sometimes swaggering through a Revolutionary War-era fife-and-drum standard (the score's "The Militia Marches In"). There's a more original sound to Marianelli's score for "The Brothers Grimm," also out in 2005, in which strong orchestral effects conjure the fairy tale ambience of that tedious but colorful film. Marianelli deserves an assignment for a score full of his own ideas. His pride at this point is being prejudiced by the constraints of Jane Austen and Rapunzel. Look for stronger entries from this composer. 'Gardener'A remarkable air of wonder pervades Iglesias' score for the John Le Carre-based "The Constant Gardener." Like Santaolalla, unafraid to utilize the gifts of colleagues, Iglesias includes Ayub Ogada performing his own, haunting "Dicholo" to tell this tale of murder and suspicion in the north of Kenya. Ogada's mile-wide vocals are heard in other sweeping entries in this evocative music. The dramatic needs of the film tend to dictate a fall-off in the more energetic tracks near the end of the CD, but so engrossing a meditational composer is Iglesias that his use of percussive instruments to "talk" Africa to us is hypnotically rewarding. 'Memoirs,' 'Munich'If you listen to the three able, intelligent, frequently moving scores mentioned here so far, and then turn to the two Williams scores nominated, you hear very easily the distinction. As dealt with in a separate article, "Memoirs of a Geisha" leaves you "humming the plot" because Williams' work is so much better than the film itself. (Read the story -- Review: Two films better heard than seen) "Munich," by contrast, is a work of powerfully disturbing issues and brave filmmaking, a film rightly honored by many for its challenging look at a response to terrorism, in this case the 1972 execution at Munich by Black September of 11 Israeli Olympic athletes. (Read the late Paul Clinton's review -- 'Munich' a masterpiece) In both cases, what Williams has done is what he has established as a high, gleaming bar for film composition: He uses the setting, the story and the dramatic world of a piece to inform and enrich his music. In "Munich," for example, Williams fans out his strings in a delivery of "Hatikvah," the Israeli national anthem, with such layered texture that the tragedy and the hope of the story coexist in a steady state. The listener -- the viewer of the film -- is nourished as well as instructed by such music. In both his "Geisha" and "Munich" scores, Williams uses beautifully expressive vocals -- in "Munich," alto; in "Geisha," soprano -- that swirl through their films' worlds of caution, fear and confusion with artful majesty, eloquent even in vocalise, without identifiable lyrics. Is what Williams writes your father's Oldsmobile in film-score terms? Probably. But boy, does this man know what he's up to. This work is, surely, an illuminating counterpoint to what the younger nominees are doing in their scores. And Williams is the real thing: He can learn from them and others, too. And so maybe the only thing that might have made this year's film-score competition even more interesting would have been swapping one of Williams' nominations for one to composer Alexandre Desplat, the formidable talent behind "Syriana." There's a little bit of all four of these nominated composers in Desplat, and a whole lot of "sonic architecture" well worth an award. It's too bad he's not in the running -- you know his work from "Casanova" and "Firewall," too. But Desplat is here, in spirit and, with luck, in nomination one year soon, too. As each of these composers crosses paths, then moves back out into his own idiom, we learn and understand the films they "sing" to us in their scores. They're all winners. And so are we for having such music as a part of the aesthetic amalgam that makes good film. Copyright 2006 CNN. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. Associated Press contributed to this report. 
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