Film music in 2025

Four award bodies voted on the same five scores for 2025. They agreed almost completely — and the one thing they agreed on by omission says as much as the winner does.

Four ceremonies, one name

Ludwig Göransson's score for Sinners won Best Score at the Critics' Choice Awards on January 4, 2026. It won again at the Golden Globes on January 11. It won the BAFTA on February 22. And it won the Oscar on March 15. Four voting bodies, four different rooms, four separate ballots — and the same score came out on top every time. That kind of clean sweep is rare enough that it's worth pausing on before getting to anything else: this wasn't a close call decided by whichever branch happened to like it best. Almost everyone who votes on film music, across almost every major body that does, landed on the same answer.

Göransson had already won the BAFTA once before, for Oppenheimer in 2024. Winning it again for Sinners two years later made him the first composer to repeat in that category inside three years since Gustavo Santaolalla did it in 2004 and 2006. At the Globes, he became the first composer to win twice in three years since Justin Hurwitz, who won for La La Land in 2017 and First Man in 2019.

The competition that couldn't crack it

The same five composers were nominated at the Oscars and BAFTA — the first time in fourteen years the two ceremonies matched exactly: Göransson, Jonny Greenwood for One Battle After Another, Max Richter for Hamnet, Alexandre Desplat for Frankenstein, and Jerskin Fendrix for Bugonia. The Globes and Critics' Choice fields were slightly wider, pulling in Hans Zimmer for F1 and Kangding Ray for Sirat alongside the same core five.

Desplat came into this year's race with three prior wins and thirteen nominations in the category at BAFTA alone — nobody nominated was working from a thinner résumé. None of it mattered. Frankenstein picked up three BAFTAs elsewhere that night, for costume design, hair and makeup, and production design. The score wasn't one of them.

The award nobody put on television

Here's the part that's easy to miss if you only look at who won. Both the Critics' Choice Awards and the Golden Globes voted for Göransson's score — and both cut the announcement from their live broadcast. At the Globes, the win was mentioned in passing coming back from a commercial break; Göransson gave an acceptance speech in the room at the Beverly Hilton that the television audience never saw. The category has run at the Globes since 1948, first won by Max Steiner for Life with Father. Hans Zimmer, nominated that same night for F1, later told Deadline that music is central to how films are remembered — a direct response to watching the category get trimmed for time.

It's a strange split: the composer wins, repeatedly, decisively, in front of every body that votes seriously on film music — and the ceremonies built for a wider audience keep deciding the win itself isn't worth airing.

What the sweep says, and what it doesn't

A score that wins at the Critics' Choice, the Globes, the BAFTA, and the Oscar in the same season isn't just popular with one branch of voters who happen to share a taste. Those four bodies don't share membership, don't share national identity — BAFTA votes from London, the Globes from the Hollywood Foreign Press's successor body, Critics' Choice from working critics, the Oscars from the Academy's own music branch — and they still landed in the same place four times running. If there's a "consensus best score" model worth using, this is close to what it looks like when it actually happens.

What it can't tell you is whether Göransson's work will be the one still discussed in ten years. Award consensus in a single season measures agreement among people voting in real time, not staying power. Sinners also released its score as two separate albums on the same day the film opened — a score record on Sony Classical featuring Metallica's Lars Ulrich and guitarist Eric Gales, and a songs record on Sony Masterworks featuring Rhiannon Giddens, Buddy Guy, and Brittany Howard — which is its own kind of statement about how the film wanted its music to travel. Four ceremonies agreeing is the strongest evidence a single season can offer. It's not the final word.

This article was researched and written with AI assistance, based on the sources listed below. Catalogue data on this page — films, releases, credits, and labels — comes directly from Cuefinda’s database, not from the article.

The Best Score for 2025

Four ceremonies, one name

The competition that couldn't crack it

The award nobody put on television

What the sweep says, and what it doesn't

Sources

Who was working

Who released it