The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) have announced the winners of the 96th Academy Awards, honoring the best in film in 2023.In the Best Original Score category Ludwig Göransson won the award for his score for Oppenheimer, director Christopher Nolan’s epic drama about the life and work of the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer whose work on the Manhattan Project in the 1940s led to the creation of the world’s first nuclear weapon. Accepting his award, Göransson said:
“Thank you Christopher Nolan and Emma Thomas for inviting me on this incredible world. Christopher Nolan it was your idea to use the violin in the score, and it allowed me to work and collaborate with my wonderful wife and acclaimed violinist Serena Göransson. We had… we recorded at night and we were rushing to home and put our kids Apollo and Romeo down to bed, but the result of that was amazing and it really set a really nice tone for the film of that performance. Theresa Stanislav, Jake Brown, Chris Fogel, Anthony Parnther, Alyssa Park, thank you for making the music sound great, and to my parents up there, thank you for giving me guitars and drum machines instead of video games! Thank you!
The other nominees were Joscelin Dent-Pooley (Jerskin Fendrix) for Poor Things, Laura Karpman for American Fiction, Robbie Robertson for Killers of the Flower Moon, and John Williams for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny.
In the Best Original Song category, the winners were Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell for “What Was I Made For” from the smash hit movie Barbie.
The other nominees were Jon Batiste and Dan Wilson for “It Never Went Away” from American Symphony, Scott George for “Wahzhazhe – A Song for My People” from Killers of the Flower Moon, Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt for “I’m Just Ken” from Barbie, and Diane Warren for “The Fire Inside” from Flamin’ Hot.
In film-music adjacent news, composer Kris Bowers also won an Oscar, not for music, but for co-directing and producing the documentary short film The Last Repair Shop, which is about a workshop in Los Angeles who find, repair, and donate musical instruments to under-privileged students in the Los Angeles Unified School District. This makes Bowers one of the few full-time film music composers to win an Academy Award for something other that composing.