Best Movie Score

Film music has an unusual problem to solve. It has to be memorable enough to carry a scene and forgettable enough that nobody notices it doing so.

The scores here mostly solved that by being extremely simple. Jaws is two notes. Halloween is a piano figure in an odd time signature that a director wrote himself because he had no budget. The Imperial March is a villain theme so effective the villain became the brand. What these have in common is that they can be hummed by someone who has never seen the film, which is the actual test of whether a score escaped the picture it was written for.

Altogether, forty-eight scores, and the thing being judged is the music rather than the film it belonged to.

That distinction matters more here than in most brackets. Several beloved films have unremarkable scores, and a few forgettable films were given music far better than they deserved. The format is unusually good at separating those, because it never shows you the movie.