Annal:2004 Anthony Asquith Award for Achievement in Film Music
From AwardAnnals
Results of the Anthony Asquith Award in the year 2004. For a ranked list of albums, try an honor roll:
Cold Mountain: Music From The Motion Picture
- 2004 BAFTA-Music winner
- 2004 Golden Globe-Score nominee
- 2004 Oscar-Score nominee
- Score: 22.54
Director Anthony Minghella’s take on Charles Frazier’s bestselling novel is powered by wistful romanticism and a dramatic structure that’s been compared to Homer’s Odyssey. That latter creative tack parallels the Coens’ O Brother, Where Art Thou in crucial ways, and is further enhanced by another T-Bone Burnett-produced soundtrack of Appalachian-inflected folk traditionals, sympathetic originals by diverse songwriters (Elvis Costello and Sting), and a core of gritty performances (the White Stripe’s Jack White and Alison Krauss) that rise above mere…
The Girl with a Pearl Earring: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
- 2004 BAFTA-Music nominee
- 2004 Golden Globe-Score nominee
- Score: 12.54
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King: Music from the Motion Picture
- 2004 Golden Globe-Score winner
- 2004 Oscar-Score winner
- 2004 BAFTA-Music nominee
- Score: 26.54
This final chapter of Peter Jackson’s sprawling adaptation of Tolkien’s “Ring” trilogy closes out one of the most accomplished cycles in cinema—and film music—history. As he’s done for the saga’s first two installments, composer Howard Shore has honed a mature, brooding orchestral masterpiece that’s long on subtle shadings of mood and nuance, while eschewing the hollow bombast that’s characterized all too many mainstream action and adventure films for three decades. If anything, he’s pared this chapter of his music for Middle Earth even closer to the bone, the…
Lost in Translation: Music from the Motion Picture
- 2004 BAFTA-Music nominee
- Score: 6.54
Sofia Coppola has, with two elegant movies, proved herself a talented director with a keen eye for interior life. She’s also got great ears. For Lost in Translation, the story of a May to December friendship in Tokyo between two displaced Americans, the score is a tonic for jetlag. Coppola prescribes a dose of shoegazer pop, from My Bloody Valentine’s chiming “Sometimes” to Jesus & Mary Chain’s fuzzed-out “Just Like Honey”. The music nails the hazy conscious state of actors Bill Murray (as a movie star in a midlife crisis) and Scarlet Johansson (as an…
Kill Bill: Volume 1 Original Soundtrack
- 2004 BAFTA-Music nominee
- Score: 6.54
Fashion be damned: Pop culture is just one big Hometown Buffet for writer-director Quentin Tarantino. Nowhere has that sensibility been more apparent than on his hand-picked soundtrack choices, and this oft tongue-in-cheek tale of a female assassin’s revenge (his first film in six years) is no exception. With dizzy, almost palpable glee, Tarantino evokes the international hall-of-mirrors influences that energize martial arts films and much of Asian pop culture in general. Thus the hip-hop of Wu Tang’s RZA (who, along with composer Charles Bernstein, concocts what…
