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Month of March, 2001

The 2000 Filmtracks Surfers' Awards:

(Based on visitors' votes from 1/6/00 to 2/6/01)

You can view the complete voting results at the January, 2001, Theme of the Month.

As Pertaining to the Academy's Picks:

This year's picks by the Academy were by no means a surprise. Unlike the more interesting years in the history of the awards, there was no last minute, black horse nomination this year. From the buzz in Hollywood before the nominations were announced, as well as the Golden Globe foreshadowings, the five nominated scores and composers all have a good reason to be there. The clear cut favorite to win the award is Lisa Gerrard and Hans Zimmer's Gladiator. It is still an average score with a few outstanding cues which, when combined with the extreme popularity of the film, propel the score into the driver's seat. Zimmer should thank Lisa Gerrard for the award, should it turn out that way, because it is her contribution to the score which has caused much of the aura around it. The only other nominated score with even a remote chance of defeating General Maximus is Tan Dun's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, for the reason that the film has picked up an enormous amount of momentum in the first months of 2001. Because Rachel Portman's romance scores (and no doubt her gender) are making her the darling of the Academy, her unremarkable score for Chocolat slipped into the mix; the film's existence in the best film category guaranteed her of that. With Ennio Morricone traveling around Los Angeles pushing hard for a Malèna nomination, the result is this year's token Mediterranean score in the ranks; and while these scores have stolen the best score award in years past, don't look for it to happen this time. Finally, John Williams received a nomination for The Patriot because, well, he's John Williams. No elaboration is necessary on that one.

Unfortunately, these five scores are not the year's best. Because of a technicality in one of the scores nominated by Filmtracks, there are six Filmtracks picks this year. The only score on both lists is Gladiator, and it only squeaked onto the Filmtracks list as a close 6th place. Had Zimmer taken extra time to coordinate a more thorough orchestration for key sequences in the film (especially for the battle scene at the start) and relied less on his Yamahas, the music could have contributed so much more to the film. The score with eligibility questions this year is Patrick Doyle's East-West. Debuting as Est-Ouest in 1999 in France, the film opened in America and Britain in 2000. Its domestic, U.S. album is also a 2000 release, however the Academy did not include the film as eligible for this year's awards. Nevertheless, because of the factors listed above, it is nominated by Filmtracks in light of its fantastically elegant piano performances and stunning second half. Danny Elfman's unreleased score for The Family Man proudly makes the nominations, too. Returning to his form of the early 1990's, Elfman produces a flighty, but powerful score with the assitance of a full orchestra and choir. Given his tendencies towards minimalistic scores in recent years, hearing such a full effort from Elfman (when, in actually, the film really didn't require it) earns him that nomination for best score.

The three very best scores nominated by Filmtracks this year all offer a glimpse into different genres of Hollywood. While they were the three first and immediate choices for the list, choosing between them for the winner was a difficult task. Our trophy for best score of 2000 rotated between each of the three during the indecisive time it took to tidy up this article during February. The collaboration between country music composers and arrangers Marty Stuart, Kristin Wilkinson, Larry Paxton produced one of the most refreshing Western scores of the past decade; All the Pretty Horses was nominated for a Golden Globe, but fizzled out by Oscar time because of the film's quick demise. In any case, its title theme and the suite at the end of its album release are some of the best unheard music of the past year. Trevor Jones' task for the dramatic thriller Thirteen Days has also gone largely unnoticed. While the film may have its faults, Jones' nearly nonstop score greatly enhances both the fear and pride of the historical event depicted. But even as good as All the Pretty Horses and Thirteen Days are, Rachel Portman continues to produce superior dramatic scores that cannot be ignored. Had it been known last year that Portman would compose The Legend of Bagger Vance in 2000, then Filmtracks' award for best score of 1999 would have been awarded to Anna and the King rather than The Cider House Rules. This would be simply for the fact that The Legend of Bagger Vance is an even more diverse score than The Cider House Rules, and had the former film not failed so miserably at the arthouse box office, you could have bet that it would have received ample Academy recognition.

In this, a very weak year for film scores, Rachel Portman sneaks away with another Filmtracks award for best score. Any number of great scores from 1997, 1998, and 1999 could have taken the trophy this year with ease. Two otherwise popular omissions from Filmtracks' awards are Dinosaur and Chicken Run. Had there been a "best musical/comedy score" award this year, those two would be the cornerstone nominations, with Chicken Run likely winning the prize for its creativity. But even with their merits noted, they are not as strong as the dramatic scores of 2000. Other runner-ups for Filmtracks' nominations were Gabriel Yared's melancholy Autumn in New York, Alan Silvestri's effective Cast Away, John Williams' usual The Patriot, and Richard Marvin's robust U-571. That said, let's still hope that 2001 offers more awards material than 2000.

While no single television score dominated the field in 2000, there were several very good orchestral compositions produced for the venue during the year. Even though it didn't impress me as much as it did many others, Mark McKenzie's The Lost Child is a reminder of his typically superior writing style, and for the mere strength of these works, McKenzie takes the prize. Patrick Williams' Jesus: The Epic Mini-Series, Christopher Gordon's On the Beach and Anne Dudley's The 10th Kingdom are close runner-ups, all featuring superb cues and effective dramatic underscores. Of note from early in the year is Richard Harvey's Arabian Nights, which has some spectacular instrumentation and vocals during its thematic performances. Also, it has come time bid farewell to the classic Jerry Goldsmith theme for Star Trek: Voyager this year, as the vastly inferior, low budget themes of the new wave of science fiction shows fail to carry on the tradition of strong orchestral television themes of the past.

Unlike the fabulous Miklós Rózsa at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer album last year, there was no single winning compilation for 2000 either. The comprehensive Electric Shadows collection of Zhao Jiping and the enjoyable Bond: Back in Action 2 both set examples as great albums, though the fantastic performances of Lawrence of Arabia by the City of Prague Philharmonic on Silva's Maurice Jarre collection from early in the year stands apart from the others.

Where do we start? Or better yet, where do we end? There were so many horrible scores in 2000 that it's difficult to choose the winner here, too. The nominees: Randy Edelman's The Whole Nine Yards, Trevor Rabin's Gone in 60 Seconds and The 6th Day, Thomas Newman's Pay it Forward and Erin Brockovich, Ryuichi Sakamoto's Taboo Gohatto, Carter Burwell's Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, John Debney's The Replacements, and Alan Silvestri's What Lies Beneath. The ultimate winner from these wretched wastes of disc space is Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2, which is a film and score that should never have been made. That's not so much a comment about Carter Burwell as it is about the film itself.

Just as the fans voted, James Newton Howard was the most productive composer of the year. With Williams, Goldsmith, and Horner (to a lesser extent) spinning their wheels in 2000, Howard stepped up and provided three solid scores. His work for Dinosaur is largely popular, as is Unbreakable in some circles. He capped off the year with a strong theme for Vertical Limit and is slated for Atlantis and other large projects in the near future. If you want to count The Sixth Sense in this streak of success, then Howard is definitely on the ascent to becoming one of Hollywood's most influential composers.

Mark Isham, for Rules of Engagement and Men of Honor. How long will it be before film producers figure out that Isham is not well suited for this genre of film scoring? His compositions for these projects are inadequate for their films and even less interesting on their albums.

For the second year in a row, Gabriel Yared wins this award. This time, it's for Autumn in New York, for which Yared composed a heartbreaking, contemporary love theme for the sax and a female vocal.

Andrea Morricone's Liberty Heights faded without a whisper early in 2000. The son of Ennio Morricone, Andrea produced a richly texture orchestral score for this small gem.

Patrick Doyle's Love's Labour's Lost brings up the same old question: why do people blow off so much of Doyle's work for musicals and Shakespearean productions? Not to mention the cold reaction that Americans have shown towards East-West... Give these scores a chance!

"The Adventures of Conan" from the limited album release of Basil Poledouris' The Adventures of Conan: A Sword and Sorcery Spectacular. The narrator's dialogue, along with the pounding Poledouris score is perfect for late-night use on pesky neighbors or, of course, use at excessive volumes on telephone solicitors.

Richard Marvin's U-571; after the major record labels balked at the costs of producing a commercial album for this score during the entire summer season, a comprehensive promotional album, with the best cues featured at the start, was provided to fans of the film and its music.

Mark Mothersbaugh's frenetic Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle mocks themes and motifs from film music and popular history, assembling a parody so thorough that it can actually get on your nerves after 30 minutes.

David Kitay's Scary Movie, which failed to unleash the fun rip-off havoc that it could have.

"Now We Are Free" from Lisa Gerrard and Hans Zimmer's Gladiator. After many revisions and several test mixes, Gerrard's voice very well symbolizes Elysium and Maximus' journey to it. Zimmer took a chance by using a new age approach for the spiritual scenes of that film, and it obviously paid off more than he could have imagined. That single cue has, by itself, catapulted sales of the score album into the millions of units.

The producers at Sony Classical, who caused the ultimate stir over their ultimate release of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. In the end, however, their choice to include all of the cues from the film in the form of their final edit proved to be accepted by the mass majority of Williams fanatics.

Benoit Jutras has been the usual composer for the Cirque du Soleil for years, and last year's Journey of Man IMAX film by the same production team provided one of the most interesting and varied scores of the year. Ranging from modern rhythms to choral and orchestral majesty, Jutras' score for the film sometimes equals the best work by major composers today.

Anne Dudley's The 10th Kingdom, which, although the television series was also aimed at prime time adult viewers, encompasses all the best elements of fantasy, including a modern adventure theme that sent parents scurrying to the record stores.

Trevor Jones' Thirteen Days, especially if you have a sense of urgency to get somewhere quickly.

Two labels share the honor this year: Varèse Sarabande provided the usual, breakneck output of scores in 2000, finishing the year strongly with the long awaited expanded edition of Total Recall, among others. The Chapter III label used its financial muscle to release several "double feature" albums in the summer of 2000, including another valued Goldsmith score, Logan's Run. Last year's winner for best score label, Milan Records, fizzled out with a relatively poor year.

The album mix for John Powell and Harry Gregson-Williams' Chicken Run is by far the best of the year, with the blend of synthetic and orchestral elements balanced out by a warehouse echoing effect, causing the score to sound much bigger than its original performance likely was.

Miriam Stockley, whose credits include the popular Adiemus albums and the film scores Rob Roy and Great Expectations, was a factor again in 2000, lending her talents to The 10th Kingdom and Autumn in New York.

Milan Record's The Price of Milk, a compilation of Russian classical pieces for use as a score, features an album cover which will terrify anyone who has ever had a nightmare about flying cows.

Pacific Time Entertianment's colorful cover for Don Davis' Turbulence 2: Fear of Flying, which depicts a passenger airplane streaking toward the ground in a colorful ball of fire against the purple night sky. Definitely not the kind of poster you'll see in travel agencies, but it does mark one of the few times that the cover art for an album is better than the musical contents of that album.

James Newton Howard's theme for Dinosaur lifts several bars of music directly from Jerry Goldsmith's The Ghost and the Darkness, most notably in the much heralded "Egg Travels" cue.

John Ottman's frightfully erotic Cruel Intentions was fantastically presented on the Varèse Sarabande album, with several other original recordings of Ottman scores also present on the disc.

Elliot Goldenthal's Titus, which also nearly won the award for "Ugliest Cover Art of 2000," is, despite its loyalty to the sick nature of the story, an unlistenable jumble of contradictory sounds and genres.

Graeme Revell took an enormous chance with his Red Planet score, and it has paid of as one of the biggest guilty pleasures of 2000. Even though some of the music was re-used from previous Revell scores, the score is a welcome twist on the norm.

"Sid Wears a Dress" from Scream 3. With the series finally experiencing some hint of resolution, Marco Beltrami victoriously spins Sid's theme into a robust major-key performance.

Joel McNeely and The Royal Scottish National Orchestra successfully interpreted Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman's Last of the Mohicans, recording many cues that were previously unavailable as well.

Once again, Lukas Kendall and Film Score Monthly have produced the best new album of previously unrelease music from the rich past of Hollywood. In 2000, the Golden Age Classics Series finished with an elegant and much needed album of Elmer Bernstein's From the Terrace, a score that even modern film music fans can appreciate.

Chapter III released the superb expanded album for Tomorrow Never Dies in the first weeks of the year, but nothing could surpass the demand that fans of James Bond and David Arnold expressed for that album.

Danny Elfman's commercially unavailable score for The Family Man is a must-have for Elfman fans, but good luck finding the promo or bootleg!

Ennio Morricone's droning Mission to Mars was so inappropriate for many of the film's scenes that people reportedly left the theatre in the middle of the film just to escape the music.

With his first mainstream score, for The Contender, available to the mass public, watch out for Larry Groupé in the coming year.

Hans Zimmer proved to the world that his rock interpretations of Lalo Schifrin's Mission: Impossible theme are no better than Elfman's... if not worse.

John Ottman, who attempted to direct, edit, and compose the score for his Urban Legends: Final Cut film, resulting in one of Ottman's weakest and most boring film scores to date.

Kevin MacDonnell. Only regular fans of Filmtracks will understand what this means, but to sum him up in a few words: this guy is the intellectual king of all Gomers. His rantings on the "FilmQuacks ScoreBoard" desperately accuse Filmtracks and other film music publications of manipulating and perverting average fans and visitors alike. MacDonnell's rantings have brought much pleasure too all who frequent the online score sites. His conspiracy theory almost reminds me of that wicked, Russian flouridation plot uncovered in Dr. Strangelove...

Film Score Monthly's Rio Conchos was a completely redundant release, with the far superior Goldsmith-conducted re-recording of the late 1980's (available on the Intrada release of the same name) prevailing as a far superior rendition of the Western score.

Tan Dun's score for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which has once again opened the eyes of closed-minded American film score fans to the wonders of Eastern film scoring. The strong sales of Sony's album for the score is an encouraging sign for international recognition of film music that most Americans and Europeans don't hear on a regular basis. Whether you like the score or not, a little diversity never hurts...

Be sure to visit the Filmtracks Awards pages, with Academy and Filmtracks picks from the last dozen years, as well as other Filmtracks Themes of the Month.

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