In January, I wrote about my disappointment that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had chosen to nominate neither Cliff Martinez nor Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for Best Original Score. (Martinez scored “Drive,” Reznor and Ross “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.”) On Twitter, my colleague Alex Ross echoed my “impatience” and NPR’s Ann Powers tweeted that Martinez was “robbed!” Then the writer Scott Plagenhoef and the composer James Lavino pointed out that “Drive” hadn’t been passed over—it had been declared ineligible.
The Academy has a unique take. “Drive” has won the Boston Society of Film Critics Award for “Best Use of Music in a Film” (an honor it shared, in a tie, with Ludovic Bource’s score for “The Artist”), the Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Best Original Score and, significantly, Best Score for an Action/Adventure/Thriller Film from the International Film Music Critics Association, a body that focusses exclusively on the use of music in movies.
I started asking questions about why “Drive” was disqualified, expecting grumbling about cronyism and an out-of-touch voter base. Check and double-check. (Read the epic and welcome piece of reporting by John Horn, Nicole Sperling, and Doug Smith in the Los Angeles Times that confirmed what many suspected about the Academy: they “are nearly 94% Caucasian and 77% male…. Blacks are about 2% of the academy, and Latinos are less than 2%. Oscar voters have a median age of 62, the study showed. People younger than 50 constitute just 14% of the membership.”) I then asked Bruce Broughton, the chair of the Academy’s Music Branch, why “Drive” had been declared ineligible. He responded in an e-mail: “The governing Music Awards Rule in this case is: ‘Scores diluted by the use of tracked themes or other preexisting music, diminished in impact by the predominant use of songs, or assembled from the music of more than one composer shall not be eligible.’ ”
What Broughton is saying is that “Drive” wasn’t a pure, wholly original piece of work. Indeed, there are songs by Kavinsky and College used at various points in the film (in the case of College’s “A Real Hero,” twice). Here’s Broughton offering further elaboration in the rule: “Sometimes the licensed music is mixed far into the background, making no impact on the effect of the score; but at other times, the licensed music is very present and dramatically powerful, compromising not only the effect but also the substance of the score. The only way to know this is to view the film. The award, after all, is for Best Original Score, not Best Licensed Music or even Best Soundtrack.”
He continued: “In the case of ‘Drive,’ there were several songs and more than one composer listed on the form. Several committee members had seen the film and thought that the songs were used in such a way as to confuse the issue of what was or was not original score.” So, then, how much of “Drive” was written exclusively by Martinez? I asked Cliff Martinez’s publicist, Beth Krakower, to offer their side: “Almost exactly 50% of the total music in the ‘Drive’ cue sheet is credited exclusively to Cliff, exclusively for this movie.” Krakower explained that Martinez actually wrote more of the music used in the film, but he shares credit with his programmers for those cues, since that is the only way that his partners get paid.
Time to quote another of the Academy’s own rules here: “The work must be recorded for use in the motion picture prior to any other usage, including public performance or exploitation through any media whatsoever.” Martinez’s score did not exist before “Drive.” Apparently, though, this rule doesn’t always matter. At all. Cary Wong makes this point in the recent Film Score Monthly: “[To] make the case that the music branch doesn’t even follow its own rules, I will bring up this fact every year if I have to: Gustavo Santaolalla’s Oscar-winning score to 2006’s Babel included “Iguazu,” a composition he wrote for his 1997 CD Ranroco (ironically also included on the soundtrack of The Insider), and it’s the most memorable piece of music in the whole film. Every clip about the score referenced that non-score piece, and they even played that piece on the Oscar telecast during the Best Score presentation. So why wasn’t Babel disqualified that year? If it had been, maybe Thomas Newman, Javier Navarette, Philip Glass or Alexandre Desplat would have won their first Oscar (a distinction all four men are still hoping to achieve).”
So, is there a real case for disqualifying “Drive”? For that to be true, the fifty per cent that Martinez wrote by himself would have to be dramatically negligible and the songs that appear in the film would have to be anchoring key dramatic moments. Watching the film three times, I simply didn’t find that to be true. The movie’s opening scene—which you can watch here, narrated by Refn, though without the music or dialogue, sadly—is a masterful layering of sounds that court total discord but somehow remain separate and intelligible, thereby making them all the more nerve-scraping: the pulse of a drum machine, a police radio, a basketball game broadcast, the beeping of an open car door. This music is Johnny Jewel’s song for the Chromatics, “Tick of the Clock,” which he rebuilt from scratch for the movie.
Other than that, the key moments of the movie, several of them wildly violent, are paired with Martinez’s music, a subtly unnerving blend of sentimental and brutal sounds. The pop songs happen during some of the movie’s most slack and generic scenes, like a montage of a jolly trip to a river, complete with innocent child. Those are not the moments that typify “Drive.” Meanwhile, Martinez chose to give his programmers songwriting credit because they deserved it, and so they could be paid as the movie made its way, commercially, through the world. An honest labor practice ends up hurting Martinez, despite having fifty per cent of the movie’s music credited to him alone.
Labor also plays a part in what did get nominated: “The Adventures of Tintin” and “War Horse,” by John Williams; “The Artist,” by Ludovic Bource; “Hugo,” by Howard Shore; and “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” by Alberto Iglesias. These are all scores that give unionized orchestra musicians work, which you can’t say about work like “Drive” or “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.” Those recorded orchestras were once the villain, though; this Smithsonian blog post documents the fear of the “robot” (recorded music) that was putting live movie accompanists out of business. Somebody’s always going to lose a job when technology and art inch forward together.
So what to do? Reznor and Ross avoided the co-writing problem by crediting their entire scores as a duo, perhaps a sign that Reznor understood what might happen if he tried to credit himself only. This award could abandon the idea of the auteur entirely, and award teams, as you commonly see in visual-effect categories. But whatever the rules are, they need to be applied evenly. This will likely come up Sunday night when the Award for Best Original Score is handed out. If the odds-makers are right, the award will go to one of the most blatant violators of the Academy’s own rules. Alex Ross will explain.
Photograph by Film District/2011.
