The Best Score for 2022

Three winners, four rooms

The Golden Globes, on January 10, 2023, gave Best Original Score to Justin Hurwitz for Babylon. The Critics' Choice Awards, six days later, gave it to Hildur Guðnadóttir for Tár instead — a score that wasn't even nominated at the Globes that same week. Then BAFTA, on February 19, and the Oscar, on March 12, both went to Volker Bertelmann for All Quiet on the Western Front. Two scores took one ceremony each. One score took two. Nobody took all four.

That's a genuinely unusual result. The two years since — 2023's Oppenheimer sweep, 2024's clean Challengers/Brutalist split — both resolved into a clear pattern once all four bodies had voted. 2022 never did. The fracture just sat there.

Hurwitz, four for four at one ceremony and nowhere else

Justin Hurwitz's Golden Globes win for Babylon was his fourth in the category, following La La Land's score and song wins in 2017 and First Man in 2019 — a perfect record at that specific ceremony, all four for scores written for Damien Chazelle films exclusively. He used the stage to make a different point than a victory lap, telling the room to "spread opportunity around" so more young creatives could find what he'd found early. But the Globes win didn't travel. Babylon picked up an Oscar nomination and a BAFTA nomination in the same category and won neither.

Guðnadóttir won for a score built to sound like a warning

Hildur Guðnadóttir's Critics' Choice win for Tár beat a field that included Bertelmann's All Quiet score directly — the only one of the four ceremonies where the two ended up in the same room and Bertelmann didn't win. Tár wasn't nominated at the Globes at all, and it didn't make the final five at either BAFTA or the Oscar. One ceremony recognized it. The other three didn't have the chance to, or didn't take it.

Bertelmann's harmonium, and the score that eventually won the room

Volker Bertelmann — who records solo work as Hauschka — built All Quiet on the Western Front's score around his great-grandmother's turn-of-the-century harmonium, mic'd closely enough to catch the instrument's own mechanical noise: the air, the wooden creaks. He's said the sound reminded him of a war machine before he'd even finished shaping it into a theme. A recurring three-note motif, one the director Edward Berger compared to Led Zeppelin, runs through the entire score, and Bertelmann filtered the music tracking the film's young soldier to sound muffled, the way gunfire and explosions might land on someone standing inside them rather than watching from outside.

The BAFTA and Oscar wins were his first in either category — he'd been nominated once before, at the Oscars, for Lion in 2016, co-composed with Dustin O'Halloran. All Quiet entered the Oscars with nine nominations total and won four, including score. It's also the second year running the Oscar went to a German composer, after Hans Zimmer's win for Dune the year before.

What a three-way scatter actually tells you

A sweep says near-everyone agreed. A clean two-two split, like the one that came two years later, says the field was close and genuinely divided down a real line. What happened in 2022 is a third thing: four bodies working from overlapping but not identical nominee lists, weighing a jazz-scored Hollywood epic, a psychological character study, and a bruising anti-war harmonium score against each other, and simply not converging. Two ceremonies eventually landed on Bertelmann. One found something in Guðnadóttir's Tár that the others didn't reward. One went with Hurwitz and stayed there. None of that means the voting was unreliable — it means 2022 was a year without a single film that everyone in the room could agree was the answer, and the results are the honest record of that.