The Best Score for 2021

A sweep, accepted mostly in absentia

Hans Zimmer's score for Dune won the Golden Globe, the Critics' Choice Award, the BAFTA, and the Oscar — all four of the major bodies, in order, between January and March 2022. It's as clean a sweep as this category produces. And Zimmer wasn't in the room for any of the big ones. He was on tour in Europe through most of the season; when the Oscar was announced, Dune star Jason Momoa accepted on his behalf, and Zimmer found out from a hotel room in Amsterdam, where his daughter woke him up at 2am to tell him. He tweeted his thanks in a bathrobe.

That absence lines up with something stranger about the season itself: two of the four ceremonies that voted for Zimmer's score didn't really happen in the way ceremonies usually do.

The Globes that nobody watched

The Golden Globes that January weren't televised at all. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association was mid-collapse — a Los Angeles Times investigation had revealed the voting body had no Black members, along with reports of gifts and conflicts of interest from studios, and NBC had already announced it wouldn't air the show. The HFPA held a private, no-red-carpet ceremony at the Beverly Hilton and posted the winners on Twitter. Dune won Best Original Score in that room, with no audience, competing against Alexandre Desplat's The French Dispatch, Germaine Franco's Encanto, Jonny Greenwood's The Power of the Dog, and Alberto Iglesias' Parallel Mothers.

The Oscar handed out before the show even started

By the time the Academy Awards happened in March, Best Original Score had already become a category under pressure for a different reason. For the first time, the Oscars pre-recorded eight below-the-line categories — score among them — and folded the presentations into the main broadcast as edited packages, rather than airing them live. John Williams was among the composers who publicly objected. Zimmer's win — his second Oscar, 27 years after his first, for The Lion King in 1995 — became a longer wait between wins than any composer in the category's history at that point, surpassing Henry Mancini's 21-year gap between Breakfast at Tiffany's and Victor/Victoria.

What the score itself was doing

Zimmer built Dune around an unusual instrumental palette for a science-fiction epic: heavy use of the duduk, an Armenian double-reed instrument, alongside a wordless female vocal line meant to evoke the Bene Gesserit, and percussion built from processed, non-traditional sound sources rather than a standard orchestral kit. He'd wanted the film to sound like nothing else in the genre, and reportedly chose to score Dune over Christopher Nolan's Tenet specifically because of how much creative latitude Denis Villeneuve gave him. The BAFTA, arriving two weeks before the Oscar, was Zimmer's first ever win from the British Academy despite eleven prior nominations there.

Four wins, two ceremonies in crisis

What makes this sweep different from Sinners' clean run four years later isn't the result — it's the condition of the voting bodies delivering it. A score can win every major award in a season and still do it inside a year where the awards themselves are visibly strained: one ceremony without a broadcast, one category without a live audience. The consensus was real. So was the fact that, in 2022, two of the four rooms making that judgment weren't functioning the way they normally do.