> That, and not all scores are created equal in stature. In the case of something so unusually large-scale as Rings of Power, that seems to me like it should weigh the scale a lot heavier than (say) Werewolf by Night.

This feels easier to execute in practice with comparing scores with similar star ratings, and I do already enable some differentiation between 4.5-star scores I'd round up to 5 vs. 4 stars (same with 3.5 stars for 4 and 3 stars).

Maybe a decent go-forward COTY metric would be take into account 5-star tiering, which would even give Ragnarök more impact than The Batman (top 100 vs. top 125).

I don't know if my current approach is really designed to cleanly fit in consideration for an 8-hour masterpiece though - but then is anyone's?

> I could see it being enough to give McCreary the argument for CotY even if he wrote no other scores this year.

This would basically be invoking the 'Howard Shore wrote another Lord of the Rings score' corollary, which doesn't really have a non-pandemic use case for me.

What you're describing is basically the dilemma with putting something like John Powell's 2018 into consideration for COTY voting when multiple other composers had impressive multi-score years of output. Would I rather have Solo than all of, say, Roque Baños' scores from that year? Yup. But 'score of the year' voting seems to handle that aspect of my preferences.