The Best Score for 2023

A violin, at the director's request

Ludwig Göransson's music for Oppenheimer starts from a specific instruction: Christopher Nolan asked him to build the score around a solo violin, describing it to Göransson as a "fretless instrument" — his way of connecting the sound to J. Robert Oppenheimer himself, a man without fixed positions, moving between certainty and collapse. Göransson took that starting point and ran it through the whole film, using the violin to carry Oppenheimer's shifting emotional states — as Göransson put it, turning "the most romantic melodic tone" into something "neurotic and manic" inside the space of a moment. Where Robert Downey Jr.'s Lewis Strauss needed a different color, Göransson reached for harp instead, giving Oppenheimer's rival his own distinct instrumental voice rather than sharing the violin's territory.

Accepting the Oscar, Göransson thanked Nolan specifically for that original idea, and thanked his wife, violinist Serena Göransson, who worked on the score's violin material with him.

Four ceremonies, one answer

The Critics' Choice Awards went to Göransson on January 14, 2024. The Golden Globes followed. The BAFTA came on February 18, held at London's Royal Festival Hall, Göransson's first BAFTA win. The Oscar came last, on March 10 — his second Oscar in the category, after Black Panther in 2019. By the time the Academy Awards actually happened, Film Music Reporter was already describing the BAFTA as something Göransson had picked up on the way to a result nobody seriously doubted; Billboard's own Critics' Choice coverage put it more bluntly: "there doesn't appear to be much of a contest for the Oscar for best original score."

A Grammy for Best Score Soundtrack for Visual Media rounded it out — five wins across five ceremonies for the same 27 minutes and change of violin-and-harp-driven material.

Who else was in the room

The Oscar and BAFTA fields overlapped but weren't identical. At the Oscars, Göransson's competition was Robbie Robertson for Killers of the Flower Moon — Robertson had died the previous August, making the nomination posthumous — alongside Jerskin Fendrix for Poor Things, Laura Karpman for American Fiction, and John Williams for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. Williams' nomination that year broke his own record for the most Oscar nominations any living person has received. At BAFTA, the fifth and final slot went to Anthony Willis for Saltburn and Daniel Pemberton for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse instead of Karpman and Williams — different branch, slightly different taste, same eventual winner regardless.

None of it moved the outcome. Killers of the Flower Moon went into the Oscars with twelve nominations and came away empty-handed everywhere, including score. Poor Things won five awards at the BAFTAs alone, including Best Actress for Emma Stone — none of them for Fendrix's music, which would go on, the following year, to actually win the category for Bugonia.

What a sweep like this actually tells you

Compare this to the year that followed, where Challengers and The Brutalist split the same four ceremonies down the middle. That split happened because two genuinely different scores — one electronic and propulsive, one built from live jazz performance — gave voters a real choice, and different rooms chose differently. Nothing like that tension existed here. Göransson's Oppenheimer score didn't out-campaign four strong competitors so much as clear the field early and stay there — the Critics' Choice and Globes results in January had already settled the outcome everyone else was voting on in February and March. When that happens, the interesting question isn't who almost won. It's why nobody seriously thought they could.