How 3 Recent Golden Globes Best Original Score Winners Made Their Mark
The Golden Globe Awards, Hollywood’s most raucous awards show, have long been popular for their party atmosphere and fun celebrity moments and continue to influence film trends and visibility. They are still one of the many awards shows used as a predictor of the Oscars, though the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s unusual picks break the “award movie” mold often.
At Universal Production Music, our diverse array of tracks reflect the sounds and moods of many of the film scores and sound designs that have taken home the trophy at the Golden Globes Awards. Here we take a closer look at recent Globes winners that might help you get inspired with sounds for your next film or TV production.
Jazz is a recurring hit with audiences
Director Damien Chazelle and longtime musical collaborator Justin Hurwitz have become somewhat known for jazz, making a splash with 2014’s intense Whiplash and the refreshing 2016 jazz-inspired musical La La Land. They relied on the sultry genre once more to score Babylon, a dizzying tale of Hollywood’s silent era, though this time, they took it to another level.
“Babylon mixes up a lot of influences,” Hurtwitz told Deadline. “It has some jazz influences, rock ‘n’ roll, and contemporary dance music in the music. There’s a lot of Middle Eastern and Latin flavors, orchestral cues, and a lot of circus sounds in the score.”
This multicultural cacophony reflects the catch-as-catch-can ethos of the silent era and the messiness of the people who were brave or crazy enough to strike it out in Hollywood when it was hardly more than a shantytown. Like jazz, early movies required improvisation, and Hurtwitz’s layered thematic stings give the illusion of controlled chaos swirling toward an inevitable resolution.
Babylon was awarded the Golden Globe for Best Original Score in 2022, and only two years before, the jazz-inspired Disney film Soul clinched the title.
If you’d like to try to put your own spin on this movie score standard, our library houses jazz albums and playlists for a variety of projects.
Sound can instantly establish cosmic scale
The ambitious Dune, which won for Best Original Score at the 2021 Golden Globes, was tasked with creating a spiritually-rich, alien world. This is not the pulpy sci-fi sound of Star Trek. The characters of Dune may possess futuristic technology, but their world is organic and imbued with mysticism from Frank Herbert’s dense cult classic novel.
To help achieve a sound that matched the gravity of the story, director Denis Villeneuve worked with industry icon Hans Zimmer, known for animating sweeping, futuristic dreamscapes in movies like Inception and Blade Runner 2049.
Zimmer used diverse instruments to create the score for Dune, which has lore that draws from several earthly cultures in Asia and the Middle East. To ensure the movie still felt like it was happening in a different galaxy, he disguised these identifiable sounds by recording many parts in a resonating chamber and processing them through a virtual synthesizer, the Cubase.
“I asked for more things to superimpose the sonic quality of one instrument onto another so you would [create] these impossible sounds,” Zimmer told IndieWire. “The characteristics of a Tibetan long horn on a cello and let a cellist play it so that you’ve invented a new instrument. I wanted it to be things which would float across the desert dunes and penetrate between the rocks.”
The final product reaches Zimmer’s goal of sounding spiritual but not religious – a tribute to the cold but breathtaking nature of alien worlds. If you’d like a similar vibe but lack a Tibetan long horn or resonating chamber of your own, check out our selection of awe-inspiring tracks for celestial vistas.
The best scores play with cultural and musical history
One winning strategy for Best Original Score is a commitment to taking cultural authenticity in a new direction. 2012’s winner, The Life of Pi, tells the story of an Indian boy’s religious reckoning, trapped on a lifeboat with a Bengal tiger. The violent tale has a bent of magical realism, and perhaps an unreliable narrator. To score it, composer Mychael Danna used the structures of Western orchestral music performed with traditional Indian instrumentation.
The rich tones and resonance of India’s instantly recognizable echoes are well-suited to visual storytelling. Peruse our tracks with cinematic Indian instrumentation for your next project about India, or its wide diaspora. Inspiration is everywhere, so register to find your next sound today, and check out our flexible, cost-effective licensing offerings.