The Best Score for 2020

A sweep, done as a trio

Soul's score — credited to Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, and Jon Batiste — won the Golden Globe on February 28, 2021, the Critics' Choice Award on March 7, the BAFTA on April 11, and the Oscar on April 25. Four ceremonies, four wins, all in the space of two months, all conducted under COVID-era restrictions — the BAFTAs held virtually for the first time, the Oscars scaled down and distanced. It's as complete a sweep as this category gets, and it happened in a year when almost nothing about the ceremonies themselves was normal.

The nomination that ran against itself

Here's the part of this particular season that stands alone: Reznor and Ross were nominated twice at the Oscars in the same category. Alongside Soul, they were also nominated for David Fincher's Mank, an entirely separate score for an entirely separate film, released the same year. Reznor called the double nomination "surreal and humbling" when the news broke. It meant that on Oscar night, two of the five nominated composers were the same two people — competing, in effect, against their own other work. Only the film's title goes on the ballot, not the composer, but the actual result was Reznor and Ross beating Reznor and Ross.

They'd already done this once before. Soul was their second Oscar in the category, eleven years after their first, for The Social Network — the same win that first put them in the conversation as a duo capable of scoring almost anything, from Fincher's clipped, paranoid dramas to a Pixar film built around jazz improvisation and the nature of an afterlife waiting room.

What Batiste's win actually meant for the category

Jon Batiste's win made him the second Black composer to win Best Original Score in the award's history, following Herbie Hancock's win for 'Round Midnight in 1986 — a gap of 35 years between the first and the second. Batiste came to the score from a different world than Reznor and Ross: he was the bandleader on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, brought in specifically to write and perform the film's jazz piano sequences, working alongside a credited list of consultants that included Herbie Hancock himself and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington. The film's plot — a jazz musician who's lost his spark, pulled out of his own body and forced to reckon with what actually matters about being alive — gave the score a job most animated films don't ask for: convincing, in-scene jazz improvisation had to sit right next to Reznor and Ross's more abstract, electronic writing for the film's afterlife sequences, and the whole thing had to hang together as one score rather than two competing styles.

Who didn't win, and why it barely mattered

The other Oscar nominees that year were Terence Blanchard for Da 5 Bloods, Emile Mosseri for Minari, and James Newton Howard for News of the World — a genuinely strong field, with Blanchard in particular building a score around themes of Black American history and Vietnam that critics singled out on its own terms. None of it moved the outcome. By the time the Oscar ceremony happened, Soul had already won every precursor that mattered; Variety's own pre-ceremony coverage noted there was no real consensus on what the plausible upset pick even was.

A sweep, with almost nobody in the same room

Set this next to Dune's sweep the following year, and the two look similar on paper — four wins, four ceremonies, no real contest by the time the Oscar came around. But Soul's sweep happened inside a pandemic-disrupted season where the ceremonies themselves were barely functioning as normal events: virtual BAFTAs, a scaled-back Oscars, Golden Globes still two years from the scandal that would eventually take their broadcast away entirely. The result was as clean as a sweep gets. The circumstances around it were anything but ordinary.