The 2024 Golden Globe for Best Original Score has been awarded to Swedish composer Ludwig Göransson for his work on Christopher Nolan's dramatic 2023 big-screen hit, Oppenheimer.
Oppenheimer was the night's biggest success story, collecting the most awards of the night. It beat off competition to win in the Best Picture category, with awards also given to Cillian Murphy for Best Actor, Robert Downey Jr for Best Supporting Actor, Christopher Nolan for Best Director and, of course, Ludwig Göransson for Best Original Score.
This is the second collaboration between Nolan and Göransson, who first worked together on Tenet following Nolan's long working relationship with Hans Zimmer, who scored six of the director's previous films.
Oppenheimer tells the story of the race to create a nuclear bomb during World War 2, starring Cillian Murphy as J Robert Oppenheimer, the fafther of the atomic bomb.
How Göransson wrote the score for Oppenheimer
Variety reported that Göransson recorded the music for Oppenheimer in just five days. At Nolan's request, Göransson's score is particularly violin-heavy. '[Nolan's] thought process was that the violin is a fretless instrument,' Göransson told Variety. 'You can go from the most romantic melodic tone and within a split second turn the tremolo into something neurotic and manic.' He worked with his violinist wife, Serena, to develop some of the techniques used within the score and match the highly strung intellect of the film's protagonist in the music.
'There's so much in the performance of the violin: in a second you can go from something beautiful to something horrifying,' he explains in this interview with Universal Pictures. 'I used a lot of synthesizers, but the heartbeat of the music is all organic,' he adds.
The score builds right through the film, until the point at which the atomic bomb explodes. The moments before this are particularly dramatic in the score, with a powerful thumping bass and a rhythmic ticking sound. When the bomb is finally tested, the orchestra cuts out and the action is accompanied by a shocking silence. 'Once he presses the button, there's no turning back,' Göransson says. 'And that's how it all builds up towards that piece of silence.'
The LA Times referred to his score as 'intensely emotional and neurotic, fragile and contradictory'.
Ludwig Göransson has been nominated twice previously in this category in 2021 and 2019 for his scores to Tenet and Black Panther respectively.
Who won the Golden Globe for Best Original Song 2023?
The Golden Globe for Best Original Song went to Billie Eilish and her brother Finneas O'Connell for their song What Was I Made For? from the soundtrack to Greta Gerwig's Barbie.
Golden Globes vs Oscars: who will win the Oscar for Best Original Score this year?
While the Golden Globes often act as a precursor to the Oscars, which take place a couple of months afterwards, it isn't necessarily a sure thing.
In 2021, Hans Zimmer's Dune won the Golden Globe, BAFTA and Academy Award in this category. This was also the same the year before, when Pixar's Soul took home the Golden Globe for Best Original Score, and then went on to win both the Oscar and the BAFTA Awards in the same category. Its composers Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross were nominated across two categories that year. They were nominated for their score to Mank, the Netflix biopic of Herman J Mankiewicz.
In 2019 we also had a repeat winner across the Golden Globes, BAFTAs and Oscars: Hildur Guðnadóttir became the first woman in history to win all three top film music awards.
In 2022 however, Volker Bertelmann's haunting All Quiet on the Western Front score won the Academy Award for Best Original Score, after the Golden Globes had awarded Justin Hurwitz's Babylon.
You can find all the previous winners of the Golden Globe for Best Original Score here.
Listen to the full score:
Top image credit: Rich Polk/Golden Globes 2024/Golden Globes 2024 via Getty Images
