6 Oscars I’d Hand Out In A Heartbeat If The Academy Would Just Give Me The Chance

4. Best Score Featuring the Made-Up Folk Songs of an Imaginary Country

OK, I’ll be honest. I’m pretty much just including this one because I stumbled across this NPR piece few days ago and I really, really love it.

Depending on your point of view, Wes Anderson movies are fantastic, artful creations or precious indulgences. Either way, the director is very particular about the music in his movies. The Grand Budapest Hotel takes place in the fictional Zubrowka, somewhere in Central Europe, at a fancy hotel that once sparkled with activity. To give the movie its central European feel, composer Alexandre Desplat used Gregorian chant, balalaikas, and the cimbalom, a hammered dulcimer heard in folk music in Hungary and Austria and elsewhere throughout the region.

Now, in fairness to the Academy, this one’s still on the table for tomorrow, and might actually come to pass without any input from me. Desplat’s score for Budapest Hotel is considered one of the front-runners, though odds-makers have it a tick or two behind Jóhann Jóhannsson’s work on The Theory of Everything. The dreaded Split Vote may prove to be Desplat’s undoing, since that he’s also nominated for his work on The Imitation Game, but we’ll see. (Speaking of Jóhannsson, his sonic contribution to last year’s Prisoners were unnoticed but spectacular. Perhaps best described as “A Perfect Musical Match for Roger Deakin’s Brilliant, Non-Winning Cinematography.”)

But I’m tipping my hand just a little. Back to Desplat.

For film music critic Jon Broxton, Desplat’s music adds to the humor. Take the musical theme that follows Willem Dafoe’s character: He’s a henchman in leather with brass knuckles, and his arrival is signaled first by organ and then by vocals.

“He has a choir,” Broxton says, “but it’s not singing. It’s kind of going rum-te-tum-te-tum-te-tum, and that just brought to mind, to me, the old images of Monty Python characters.”

(I had a hard time thinking of a Runner Up for this one. Would John Leipold’s “Freedonia Hymn” from Duck Soup count? Good. Let’s go with that one, then.)