Why Christopher Nolans The Dark Knight could not get an Oscar nomination for the best score

Not all of them agree on the best score for a Batman film, but people generally agree that the score for “The Dark Knight” is at the top of the list. If nothing else, it is impossible not to love these last 30 seconds from “I'm not hero”, which is usually played in the film when Batman does something particularly cool. The scores for the other films in the trilogy “Dark Knight” are solid, but “Batman begins” does not feel exactly in comparison to his successor, and the score for “The Dark Knight Rises” feels as if it were trying to try to regain this “Dark Knight” am.

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But the forums intensely and atmospheric, as the music in “The Dark Knight” is, has neither won an Oscar for the best original music. As reported at that time, “the music department of the academy acted after it had found that five people were attributed to writing the score. Although nobody knows exactly how many people can be involved, it was apparently too many.”

Although Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard are the main names of the score, music editor Alex Gibson, music designer Mel Wesson and composer Lorne Balfe are also attributed. The three of them apparently signed “an affidavit that said that rooms and Howard were the main composers of the work”, but that was not enough that the academy changed their opinion. “The Dark Knight” was nominated in eight Oscar categories and won two of them, but the Oscar for the best original score went to Ar Rahman for “Slumdog Millionaire”. Howard could at least not be too upset; In the same year he was nominated for his score for “defiance”.

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The reasoning behind the exclusion of “The Dark Knight” in the music category feels a little flimsy, because it is not like a film soundtrack that is ever composed by only one or two people anyway. For example, Hans Zimmer spoke a lot about how he works for every film with an entire team of people. “I never hide my employees,” said Zimmer in an interview from 2013, “but as a composer I am the main architect. This means to be responsible for the initial idea of ​​being the style, the topics, orchestration and instrumentation. The great idea.

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He explained how his soundtracks are composed with the help of “programmers, arrangers, assistants, additional composers … in space with the director, the editor and the music editor, they will be part of the process”. Zimmer spoke about how he tries to owe as much as possible to the people with whom he works, but in the end it is not practical that an album has so many names in the middle: “Sometimes it is simply not possible. The 'additional composer' loan 'inevitably means that someone has to give up their loan in another department.”

On the bright side it is hardly like rooms or Howard have never blinded themselves. Room was nominated twelve times for an Oscar during his entire career and won one twice, most recently for his score for the first “Dune” film in 2022. You may not have a chance for “The Dark Knight”, but at least the academy allowed them many more options.

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