View image "There Will Be Blood" features a score that sounds like it could have been heard in the period, 1898 - 1927 (with the bulk of it taking place in 1911, the year Arnold Schoenberg published "Harmonielehre"). Some of it was composed in 2005-06 (Greenwood); some in 1878-79 (Brahms).
From Daily Variety (1/21/08):
Jonny Greenwood's original score for "There Will Be Blood" has been ruled ineligible by the music branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. [...]Given that "Popcorn," commissioned by the BBC in 2005 and previously performed in concert, broadcast, published, and made available on the Internet, is less than 20 minutes long, almost all of it (15 minutes) was evidently used in "There Will Be Blood." I wonder if this contributed to my impression (not as strong the second time I saw the movie), that pre-existing swatches of music had simply been laid on top of cut footage, regardless of what was onscreen. (The intrusive, dissonant score -- period-appropriate in its retro-modernism -- bleeds over adjoining and unrelated scenes without changing from one to the next.)The disqualification has been attributed to a designation within Rule 16 of the Academy's Special Rules for Music Awards (5d under "Eligibility"), which excludes "scores diluted by the use of tracked themes or other pre-existing music."
[Radiohead lead guitarist] Greenwood's score contains roughly 35 minutes of original recordings and roughly 46 minutes of pre-existing work (including selections from the works of Arvo Pärt, as well as pieces in the public domain, such as Johannes Brahms' "[Violin] Concerto in D Major"). Peripheral augmentation to the score included sporadic but minimal useage (15 minutes) of the artist's 2006 composition "Popcorn Superhet Receiver."
What's peculiar is that the Oscar nominations are due to be announced Tuesday the 22nd, and the Academy didn't announce it's disqualification ruling until Monday the 21st. So not only was it too late for the filmmakers to appeal, but members of the music branch who voted for Greenwood's score were unable to vote for something else instead.
The ruling is perfectly valid and consistent. The timing is inexcusable. AMPAS continues to screw up royally, even according to its own rules.
Hey back before 72 you couldn't even use your own previously written music in an original score. It's what got Nina Rota disqualified for the Godfather only to have Carmine Coppola win with much of Rota's music two years later. Now that sucks!
As to this score I'm afraid I didn't find it disconcerting like you did. I found it propulsive and invigorating and apt to what I saw on the screen but I do know what you mean. I remember when I saw Tod Browning's Dracula with the new score by Philip Glass it seemed as if Glass wrote some music like he always does (in no relation to the film whatsoever) recorded it and then they just laid it over the soundtrack without even watching the movie.
JE: I did appreciate it more the second time -- and, to some extent, Daniel Day Lewis's performance, too (until the last couple scenes). I guess it's like anything big and overpowering: you get slightly more accustomed (inured?) to it with further exposure, once you know what to expect.
MILD SPOILER:
Greenwood’s score succeeds in casting an air of oppressive menace, dread, and foreboding right from the first scene of TWBB. The problem I have with the music though, is it severely overstates what actually transpires within the film. What I saw happen in TWBB is - amongst the father/son dynamic and many other tense Plainveiw relationships - a focus on the dislike, mis-trust, and tension between a greedy, amoral oilman and an unbalanced preacher/faith healer. That tension finally boils over after a few decades into madness & murder. The final scenes, both with the son and the preacher, were inevitably set up to be something of a let down after relentlessly being primed for some gargantuan, apocalyptic cataclysm based on the heavy handed score dominating the film from the opening scene.
In comparison, Malick’s Days of Heaven actually does end with a apocalyptic plague of locusts plus a murder as well, but Morricone’s score in "Days" never overplays its hand the way Greenwood’s gratuitously does in TWBB.
So, is it fair that the academy disqualified Greenwood’s score without leaving anytime for appeal? No. But since the music functioned – to me -as an overall negative value to the TWBB, I think it would have been a mistake for it to be nominated it in the first place.
The problem I have with the music though, is it severely overstates what actually transpires within the film.
Not unlike an awkward kitchen conversation between a bumbling cop and a strung out young woman being set to Wagner. Which I loved, BTW.
The problem with the score and the final few scenes of the film is that the score from the first 2/3rds of the film is a different film than the last third.
The score tells you that something bad is going to happen. Foreboding. It's great.
The last few scenes take an illogical jump from where the characters had been. When last we see Plainview he's a conflicted character. The baptism has brought something out in him. When we jump forward, conflict no longer exists. Therefore the score is inappropriate.
When last we see the son he seems to have emotionally separated himself from his father. In the final few scenes he declares that really really loves him. Logical? Nope. It's the equivalent of emotional laziness on the part of Anderson falling back on the easy out of the relationship.
And then the scene with Plainview and Eli, another cop out ensues when Eli is found to be a false prophet. By turning Eli into something worse than Plainview, or at least something as bad, the final moments are not nearly as effective as they would have been if Eli's character was the genuine article and didn't start bawling (got it right this time, though "balling" at Plainview might have been more interesting) about having financial difficulties. There was no reason why Plainview shouldn't have done what he did.
How mad is it to lay down justice in a metaphorical and physical level. It turns Plainview into a demented arm of justice, taking out the liars and hypocrites. And by doing so, allowing foreboding to have less to do with the final moments of the film to which they are a prophecy for.
The last part of the film just doesn't connect. It's dissonant in a bad way.
you say that the timing is inexcusable but the ruling is consistent. Consistent with what exactly?
Last year they gave the actual trophy to Babel which, to my knowledge at least from reports I've read, has even less original music. And Santaolalla also uses previously composed material of his own. Plus the most famous musical passages in the movie are from another composer entirely.
The music branch deserves close inspection because this looks suspiciously like bending their rules to welcome whichever films or composers they like and rid themselves of work or composers they don't.
JE: Good point. I'm not sure about the (winning) "Babel" score, but the music branch is supposed to actually time the amount of music that's used in the film and compare original and pre-existing music, based on the notes given to them by the composer. Still, it's quite possible that the music the voters actually liked best in the film wasn't actually composed for it! You'd think the music branch would want to include somebody like Greenwood (his popularity with a younger crowd could only do the Academy some good!), but perhaps he is viewed as an outsider.
I don't see the scandal. The bulk of the music was simply not an "original" score - as in, written specifically for the film. Some new music was written for it, but being quite familiar with Greenwood's two pre-existing pieces as well as the Part and Brahms, I can tell you that a very small percentage of the music you heard in the film was actually written for it.
As to the timing: who cares? There is no greivance procedure by which the producers could challenge the ineligibility, as far as I know. A score is either eligible or not. I liked the use of music myself, and I'm quite fond of the Greenwood pieces, but had it been nominated I would have thought it a sham, or that the Academy's music division under-researched the content.
Re-posting this excellent (and well-researched) comment from Jonathan Lapper, which he contributed to another comments thread about the Oscar noms here:
As to the musical score questions: For musical score there used to be a rule that you couldn't use any work you had previously composed in a new piece. In 1972 this resulted in Nina Rota being disqualified for The Godfather and led to Charlie Chaplin winning for a score he had done twenty years prior for Limelight because it had just been released in the States. They changed the release rule after this to ineligibility after two years from initial release outside the states (but it's a nebulous rule) and said you could use previous music in your score. So... in 1974 Carmine Coppola used previous music composed for The Godfather (by Nina Rota) along with his own and that was allowed because he was incorporating a theme from the connected film's work, and he won along with Rota who was no longer a sinner in the Academy's eyes. Now the rule is you can use your own new and previous work but you cannot use adapted work (like Brahms) although the understanding was that the adapted work would not be considered a part of the original score and thus not infringe on any rules. In other words, it's understood that a composer may put together a score and the movie may also have other music and popular songs on the soundtrack but we all know the song on the car radio doesn't count.
Here are the relevant rules (editing out the stuff that doesn't apply here):
1. The work must be specifically created for the eligible feature-length motion picture.
4. The work must be recorded for use in the film prior to any other usage including public performance or exploitation through any of the media whatsoever.
5. Only the principal composer(s) or song writer(s) responsible for the conception and execution of the work as a whole shall be eligible for an award. This expressly excludes from eligibility all of the following:
(a) supervisors
(b) partial contributors (e.g., any writer not responsible for the over-all design of the work)
(c) contributors working on speculation
(d) scores diluted by the use of themes tracked or other pre-existing music
(e) scores diminished in impact by the predominant use of songs
(f) scores assembled from the music of more than one composer.
Clearly The Godfather Part II violated both Rule no. 4 and its addendum f, as it had more than one composer.
So what's all this mean? It means the Academy is full of crap and picks and chooses who violates eligibility requirements and who doesn't. Somebody didn't want J. Greenwood nominated and pulled a fast one.
Wait a minute... Jim - You're not on the eligibility committee are you? :)
JE: Thanks, Jonathan! Actually, I appreciated the score a lot more the second time. It's still intrusive and dissonant (that's the whole idea!) but I found it truly distracting/distancing in only a few places this time.
I wonder why the 35 minutes of original material wasn't enough to qualify Greenwood for the nomination. According to a recent NY Times article, Carter Burwell's 16 minutes of score for No Country for Old Men met the eligibility requirement.
For years now, The Academy has changed and re-changed the rules for the original score Oscar, that it's almost impossible to make sense of the current ones, especially in relation to the recent ones.
Consider this example: In 2001, Howard Shore won Best Score for his (outstanding) score to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. The following year, his score to The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers was disqualified because of a recent change in the rules in which the Academy made deemed that any score not featuring a certain percentage of "original" music would be rules out. According to the Academy, The Two Towers did not meet that requirement, since it contained references to the tapestry of themes from the first film. Mind you, Shore never replicated these themes, or tracked them in; each performance was a unique rendition of a given theme, with new orchestrations and arrangements. But because there was too much "old material" (as deemed by the Academy), it was disqualified.
After much heat over the new rules, which also disqualified John Williams' sequel scores to Harry Potter and Star Wars (though perhaps justifiably since the former featured a large amount of tracked material from The Phantom Menace), the Academy unofficially loosened the rules in the following year, when Howard Shore's score for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was not only eligible, but won the Oscar. No one knows how or what happened, but the Academy backed off so as to enable the film to complete its sweep that year and tie the record for the most Oscars. So the first and third score from the trilogy were nominated and won the Oscar, while the second wasn't even nominated. One should also note that in 2004, John Williams' excellent score for Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban was nominated (although it didn't win). The score featured references to the previous scores' themes, although they weren't extravagant or many. Other than this, no sequel score has since been nominated in best original score category. One has to wonder, with the new Indiana Jones coming out this year, how the Academy will handle it, as all three previous Jones scores were nominated, and it will be Williams' first score in years. (And we all know how much the Academy loves to nominate Williams.)
This is only the beginning of my concerns regarding the elsuive Best Original Score category. The rules are fraught with ambiguity and inconsistency, as is evident in the nominees in the past eight to nine years.
How in the world do we determine "original material," let alone a percentage of it? If a film in a series references previous themes -- motifs that identify with particular characters and locations -- in ways that further develop a musical idea, how is that not original music? Should we disqualify certain films from the Best Picture category because they don't feature original characters, or even plotlines?
This is but one small example of the futility of pomposity of these awards for cinema. I'm not suggesting that we shouldn't recognize excellent work, but the whole process seems to reduce cinema to a simple medium, made up quantifiable and categorizable formal details.