The Best Score for 2024

Two winners, not one

Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross won Best Original Score at the Golden Globes on January 5, 2025, for Challengers. They won it again at the Critics' Choice Awards days later. Then the BAFTAs, held February 16, went to Daniel Blumberg for The Brutalist. Two weeks after that, the Oscar went to Blumberg too, on March 2. Four ceremonies, two different scores, split exactly down the middle — the earlier-voting American shows picked one film, the British and Academy voters picked the other.

That's worth sitting with, because it's the opposite of what happened the following year, when Sinners swept all four bodies clean. Here, the same five-ish composers were in the room every time, and the room simply didn't settle on one answer.

Challengers: a score that never asked to be turned down

Reznor and Ross's music for Challengers is dance music first — propulsive, electronic, built to sit under a tennis rivalry film the way a club track sits under a night out rather than the way a string section sits under a drama. Atticus Ross put it plainly accepting the Globe: "The music never felt like a safe choice, but it always felt like the right one." He added, at the Golden Globes specifically, that he and Reznor had half-expected Luca Guadagnino to ask them to dial it back at some point during production. He said that call never came.

It was their third Golden Globe win in the category, after The Social Network in 2011 and Soul in 2021 — putting them level with Justin Hurwitz as the only composers to win the Globes' score award three times so far this century. The Challengers score also took Best Music Score at the Los Angeles Film Critics Association and Best Original Score at the Chicago Film Critics Association before the Globes even happened, and it went on to a Grammy nomination for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media. What it didn't do was carry that early momentum into BAFTA or the Oscar — it wasn't nominated at either.

The Brutalist: two players, one score, one instrument doing double duty

Daniel Blumberg's route to the same category was almost the reverse story. The Brutalist was only his second feature film score, after Mona Fastvold's The World to Come, which had already won him an Ivor Novello. He built the Brutalist score around live jazz performance — saxophone, prepared piano played by John Tilbury, trumpet from Axel Dörner — recorded with musicians actually playing to the picture rather than assembled afterward. Reviewing the score, NME called it "a jagged steam-roller," language that points at the same thing Blumberg described in his own BAFTA-winning work: music built to carry Adrien Brody's character's mounting despair rather than sit politely under the drama.

He won the BAFTA first, on February 16, and the Oscar two weeks later on March 2 — his first nomination and first win at both. Accepting the Oscar, he called director Brady Corbet his "artistic soulmate," and thanked what he described as the "hard-working, radical musicians" who performed the score live. The Brutalist had entered the Oscars with ten nominations total; the score win was one of two the film took that night, alongside cinematography.

Where the four bodies actually diverged

The nominee lists tell part of the story. At the Globes and Critics' Choice, the field included Challengers, The Brutalist, Conclave (Volker Bertelmann), Emilia Pérez (Clément Ducol and Camille), The Wild Robot (Kris Bowers), and Dune: Part Two (Hans Zimmer) — six wide. By the time BAFTA and the Oscar nominations landed, Challengers and Dune: Part Two were both off the list, replaced by Nosferatu (Robin Carolan) at BAFTA and Wicked (John Powell and Stephen Schwartz) at the Oscars. Different branches, working from overlapping but not identical shortlists, arrived at genuinely different fields to choose from — which goes some way to explaining why they didn't land on the same answer.

What a split tells you that a sweep doesn't

A four-for-four sweep, like Sinners managed the following year, is easy to read: near-total agreement, a score that worked for almost everyone who votes seriously on film music. A two-two split like this one is a different kind of evidence. It says the field was close enough, and different enough in character — a needle-drop-adjacent electronic score against a live-performed instrumental one — that reasonable rooms of voters, working independently, landed in different places. That's not a weaker result for either score. It's a more honest picture of a year where there wasn't a single obvious answer, only two strong, very different ones that split the vote exactly where the calendar split the voting bodies: American shows first, British and American Academy voters after.