The Oscars Have No Idea What a Score Is

This week on Oscars Outsider, we dive into one of the Academy’s strangest and most confusing categories: Best Original Score.From the early days of studio music departments to decades of split categories, reunited categories, musical exceptions, adaptations, and shifting definitions of what “original” even means, the Oscar for film music has had one of the messiest histories of any Academy Award. We trace how the category changed over time, why musicals caused so many problems, and how the Academy ended up rewarding — and ignoring — some of the most famous scores in movie history.Along the way, we talk Bernard Herrmann, Henry Mancini, Duke Ellington, West Side Story, John Williams, Schindler’s List, Jurassic Park, Hans Zimmer, The Lion King, and why Oscar voters keep struggling to separate great movie music from great scores.