Thursday, January 22, 2009

Oscars 2009 - Best Original Score nominations

The nominations for this year's Academy Awards, aka Oscars have been announced yesterday! The nominees in the Best Original Score category are -

*The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - Alexandre Desplat
*Defiance - James Newton Howard
*Milk - Danny Elfman
*Slumdog Millionaire - A.R. Rahman
*WALL-E - Thomas Newman

You can read the rest of the nominations here - http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/art … QD95S7OB82

I'm glad, really, that maestro Rahman got nominated for this most prestigious award! His songs Jai Ho and O Saya from Slumdog Millionaire have also been nominated in the Best Original Song category, competing only with Down To Earth from Wall-E.

While I'm rooting all-out for ARR in the Song category, as he more than deserves that one, I'm kinda in a dilemma over the Original Score one. While I'm rejoicing as an Indian and a big ARR fan, I'm quite confused as a film music fan. The score of Slumdog is nice, no doubt, but is it better than the others like JNH's Defiance and Newman's Wall-E? IMO, the honest answer would be no. I'd rather have liked to see ARR get nominated for one of his many wonderful orchestral scores, such as Lagaan or Warriors Of Earth And Heaven, rather than Slumdog which primarily consists of eletronics and techno beats combined with guitar and traditional Indian instruments.

To be honest, I'd rather like the score award to go to either James Newton Howard for his excellent suspenseful violin-based score to Defiance, or Thomas Newman for his quirky, yet emotional and fun score to Wall-E (many film music fans are also hoping for Desplat's Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, but personally that one hasn't grown on me much so far. But certainly it is a strong contender). But based on the recent Oscar Best Original Score winners, which I've been following for quite some time, I'm pretty sure Rahman is gonna bag the Score award, and also hopefully the Song one. But c'mon, I'm one proud Indian and ARR fan, so why worry? :D

Will be eagerly looking forward to the fateful night (or day here) on the 22nd of February, 2009!!

Sunday, January 11, 2009

A.R. Rahman bags Golden Globe Best Original Score Award for "Slumdog Millionaire"!!

Congrats to maestro A.R. Rahman for beating strong competitors like Hans Zimmer's Frost/Nixon and James Newton Howard's Defiance to win the Golden Globe Best Original Score award for Slumdog Millionaire! This makes me one very proud Indian and film music fan!! Here's to hoping for a good future of Rahman scores. I hope he gets many more Hollywood assignments and more of his scores get released for us all to enjoy on CD! It's been too long for him delivering great scores to Hindi films and getting neither proper recognition nor proper release for them. Go, maestro Rahman! You deserve it!!

Saturday, January 10, 2009

Welcome to the new Scorehaven!

In this brand new blog, you can read my analysis of latest film scores and my own thoughts about film scoring and composers. Coming first will be a personal opinion of film scores and the story of my journey into the film music world in a nutshell.

Enjoy, and please be sure to comment and tell me what you think of my posts!