What To Know About Song & Score Contenders

Sinners made history when the nominations for the 98th annual Academy Awards were announced Jan. 22. The Ryan Coogler-directed blockbuster received a record 16 nods, beating the old record of 14 shared by All About Eve, Titanic and La La Land. Sinners is the only film from 2025 to land nominations in both music categories — best original song (for “I Lied to You” by Raphael Saadiq and Ludwig Göransson) and best original score (for Göransson).

One Battle After Another, which amassed the second most nominations with 13, and Frankenstein, which tied Marty Supreme and Sentimental Value for third place with nine, are also represented in the best original score category by Jonny Greenwood and Alexandre Desplat, respectively.

But the members of the music branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences didn’t just focus on heavily nominated films: Compositions from the music documentaries Diane Warren: Relentless and Viva Verdi! received nominations for best original song, which are those films’ only nods.

The Oscars will air live on ABC on March 15 at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT. Conan O’Brien will host for the second year in a row.

Best Original Song

The members of the music branch could hardly have selected a more diverse field of nominees in this category. The chosen songs include (in alphabetical order below) an emotional power ballad, an effervescent K-pop smash, an authentic Southern blues number, an operatic aria and a haunting acoustic folk song.

“Dear Me”
Diane Warren: Relentless (Masterclass/ Greenwich Entertainment)
Music and lyric by Diane Warren

This is the ninth consecutive year that Warren has been nominated in this category — an unprecedented feat. The previous record of eight consecutive nominations was set by Sammy Cahn, who made it every year from 1954 to 1961 — a streak that started before Warren was born.

Warren has received 17 nominations in this category, which puts her third on the all-time leaderboard behind just Cahn (26) and Johnny Mercer (18). Making that achievement even more impressive: Warren has rarely been part of an Oscar-magnet film that swept the nominations. “Dear Me” is her 12th nominated song that originated in a film that received no other nods.

The end-title song sung by Kesha in Diane Warren: Relentless draws on what Warren would tell her younger self. “I was a lonely, misunderstood, bullied kid that spent a lot of time in my room by myself when I wasn’t being kicked out of school or things like that,” she told Billboard hours after learning of her latest nomination. “What I wanted to do was tell that young girl sitting in a room and picking up a guitar and maybe writing her first song that, ‘You don’t know it now, but you’re going to be all right.’ ”

“GOLDEN”
Kpop Demon Hunters (Netflix)
Music and lyric by EJAE, Mark Sonnenblick, Joong Gyu Kwak, Yu Han Lee, Hee Dong Nam, Jeong Hoon Seon and Teddy Park

“Golden,” which won best original song at both the Critics Choice Awards and the Golden Globes, appears to be the front-runner in this category. The smash by HUNTR/X, the fictional trio whose singing voices are provided by EJAE (Rumi), Audrey Nuna (Mira) and REI AMI (Zoey), topped the Billboard Hot 100 for eight nonconsecutive weeks. It’s the first song since Justin Timberlake’s “Can’t Stop the Feeling!” from Trolls in 2017 to reach No. 1 and subsequently land an Oscar nod. (“Shallow” from A Star Is Born hit No. 1 only after its Oscar win.)

The academy has a rule that it will present no more than four Oscar statuettes in this category. If there are more than four credited writers, the writers must sign an agreement that they will share one statuette if they win. The seven writers of “Golden” signed such an agreement.

“Golden” tied the all-time Oscar record as the song with the most nominated songwriters. The Counting Crows hit “Accidentally in Love” from Shrek 2, which was nominated in 2005, was also the work of seven songwriters.

The “Golden” co-writers (except for American-born Sonnenblick) are the first South Korean-born songwriters to be nominated since Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O, who was cited in 2014 for co-writing “The Moon Song” from Her.

“I LIED TO YOU”
Sinners (Warner Bros.)
Music and lyric by Raphael Saadiq and Ludwig Göransson

This is the second nomination in this category for both songwriters. Saadiq was nominated in 2018 for co-­writing “Mighty River” from Mudbound; Göransson in 2023 for co-writing “Lift Me Up” from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.

Sinners is the third consecutive Coogler film that has spawned a best original song nominee following Black Panther (“All the Stars” in 2019) and Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (“Lift Me Up” in 2023).

Miles Caton, who plays Samuel “Sammie” Moore (aka “Preacherboy”) in the film, sings “I Lied to You” on the soundtrack. Caton co-wrote another Sinners song, “Last Time (I Seen the Sun),” which was shortlisted in this category.

“I Lied to You” is also nominated for best song written for visual media at the 2026 Grammy Awards, along with two other Sinners songs — “Pale, Pale Moon” and the title track. Sinners is just the third film to produce three or more nominees in this Grammy category following Waiting To Exhale (three nods in 1997) and Barbie (four nods in 2024).

“SWEET DREAMS OF JOY”
Viva Verdi! (Viva Verdi!)
Music and lyric by Nicholas Pike

This is the first nomination for Pike, an English film/TV composer who has been active since 1987.

Viva Verdi! shines a light on the elderly opera singers and musicians who live in Milan’s Casa Verdi retirement home. Pike, who also scored the film, wrote “Sweet Dreams of Joy” based on a 12-minute snippet of the documentary sent to him by producer Christine La Monte. “It was so inspiring. It was so full of humanity and music and energy that I literally walked over to the piano and wrote the piece without any thought of (whether it) would it end up in the film,” he told Billboard. “It was just so moving I had to write the piece. The lyrics took me a little longer to finesse, but, really, it was just pure inspiration.”

Pike found the process of writing “Sweet Dreams of Joy” so rewarding that he has written more arias for upcoming films. He is also entertaining the idea of writing an opera that he hopes could appeal to a younger audience.

Puerto Rican soprano Ana María Martínez sang the aria after the original singer came down with bronchitis.

“TRAIN DREAMS”
Train Dreams (Netflix)
Music by Nick Cave and Bryce Dessner; lyric by Nick Cave

This is the first Oscar nod for both Cave, the leader of Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, which has released 18 studio albums since 1984, and Dessner, guitarist in The National, which has released 10 studio albums since 2001. Bryce Dessner is the twin brother of Aaron Dessner, a founding member of The National, whose outside activities include work with Taylor Swift.

Train Dreams is such a minimalist film that director Clint Bentley and Dessner, who scored the film, questioned if it even needed a song. Cave was Bentley’s first choice to write the lyrics and perform the song — a choice that Dessner seconded. “He’s obviously a huge hero of mine, of my band, and someone we’ve listened to forever,” Dessner told Billboard. “It was not something I had imagined doing because how would we get to him?” But it turns out that Cave was a fan of the 2011 novella of the same name that the film is based on, about a railroad laborer who suffers a great loss.

Cave is the third songwriter from Australia to be nominated in this category following John Farrar, for writing “Hopelessly Devoted to You” from Grease, and Peter Allen, for co-writing “Arthur’s Theme (Best That You Can Do)” from Arthur, which won.

Best Original Score

Alexandre Desplat and Ludwig Göransson are both two-time winners in this category. If either wins, they would become the first three-time winner in this category in this century. Jonny Greenwood and Jerskin Fendrix are both previous nominees in this category. This is the first nod for Max Richter. Who’s missing? For the first time in 11 years, no American composers are nominated; and for the first time in three years, no women composers are nominated.

BUGONIA
Jerskin Fendrix (Focus Features)

The English composer-musician is best known for writing the scores to three films directed by Yorgos Lanthimos and starring Emma Stone — Poor Things (2023), Kinds of Kindness (2024) and Bugonia (2025). For both Poor Things and Bugonia, composer, director and star all received Oscar nods. (Stone won her second best actress award for Poor Things.) Kinds of Kindness didn’t land with Oscar voters, receiving no nods.

In addition to his soundtrack work, Fendrix has released two solo studio albums, Winterreise (2020) and Once Upon a Time in Shropshire (2025), and one live album, Live at Cafe OTO (2021). Lanthimos commissioned Fendrix to write the score for Poor Things after hearing Winterreise. It was Fendrix’s first film score.

After composing the score for Bugonia, Fendrix conducted and recorded the 90-piece London Contemporary Orchestra in a single room at AIR Studios in London. Milan Records released the soundtrack on Oct. 31, 2025.

This was one of four nods the film received, along with best picture, best actress for Stone and best adapted screenplay for Will Tracy. Fun fact: Fendrix made cameo appearances in Poor Things and Kinds of Kindness.

FRANKENSTEIN
Alexandre Desplat (Netflix)

This is Desplat’s 12th nomination for best original score, which puts him in a tie with Hans Zimmer for third place on the list of living composers with the most nominations in score categories. They trail only John Williams (who has amassed an astounding 49 nods in score categories) and Thomas Newman (14).

This is the third time the French composer has scored a film directed by Guillermo del Toro. They previously teamed on The Shape of Water (for which they both won Oscars) and Pinocchio. Desplat considers Frankenstein the “third movement of the triptych” with del Toro. “They are all about the creatures and being able to receive love, to give love and create empathy, so there’s some kind of line going through these three scores and these three movies,” he told Billboard.

To represent humanity in Frankenstein, Desplat chose “the smallest, tiniest, most beautiful and most difficult instrument, which is the violin,” he says. “We wanted to avoid the obvious, avoid the horror film, avoid the scary and we knew that we needed to be touched, moved by the creature. Very early on, we spoke about using a string instrument because the creature is a huge thing and we need to have a counterpoint.”

HAMNET
Max Richter (Focus Features)

First-time Oscar nominee Richter is a classically trained, German-born British composer-pianist. He has recorded nine solo albums and has received two Grammy nominations — best score soundtrack for visual media for Ad Astra and best music video as a featured artist on Woodkid’s “The Golden Age.”

This was one of eight nods Hamnet received. The Chloé Zhao-directed film looks at William Shakespeare and wife Agnes’ courtship, marriage and subsequent death of a child that led Shakespeare to write Hamlet.

Richter told Billboard he was deliberately “very sparing” in his musical choices to let the “powerful, very emotional material speak on its own terms without trying to direct us as the audience in any particular way.” He also brought in renowned Renaissance choir Tenebrae, “but I transformed those vocal recordings in the computer into a sort of haunted, ghostly version.”

For all the dark topics that Hamnet addresses, Richter says working on the movie was a joyous experience. “It really is a special project to me because very often you may work on a film and the film will turn out great, but the project was a nightmare, right? That was not the case with Hamnet. The vibes on that set were just amazing.”

ONE BATTLE AFTER ANOTHER
Jonny Greenwood (Warner Bros.)

One Battle After Another is the sixth consecutive Paul Thomas Anderson film that Greenwood has scored following There Will Be Blood, The Master, Inherent Vice, Phantom Thread (which earned Greenwood his first Oscar nod) and Licorice Pizza.

Greenwood received his second Oscar nod for scoring Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog. This is his third. Greenwood, the lead guitarist in Radiohead, has now received as many Oscar nominations for best original score as Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, the mainstays of fellow rock titans Nine Inch Nails, who have been nominated for The Social Network, Mank and Soul (winning for The Social Network and Soul).

Greenwood was involved with One Battle After Another since its inception. The English composer wrote music based on the script and played to the finished film during production. The score was recorded with the London Contemporary Orchestra, conducted by Hugh Brunt. It was released by Nonesuch Records on Sept. 26, 2025, the same day as the film’s release on digital platforms. The album was released on CD and vinyl on Nov. 14.

All tracks on the soundtrack album were solely written by Greenwood, except “Mean Alley,” which he co-wrote with his Radiohead bandmate Thom Yorke.

SINNERS
Ludwig Göransson (Warner Bros.)

Göransson’s music for Sinners won best original score at both the Critics Choice Awards and the Golden Globes, making it the apparent front-runner in this category. This is Göransson’s third Oscar nod for best original score. He was previously nominated (and won) for Black Panther and Oppenheimer. Göransson is also nominated for best original song. It’s the first time he has been nominated in both categories in the same year.

The Swedish composer has scored all five of director Ryan Coogler’s films — Fruitvale Station, Creed, Black Panther, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Sinners. Coogler and Göransson, who met in college at the University of Southern California, worked together on developing the music for Sinners. During preproduction, the director sent his composer several recordings from the 1930s and early 1940s, particularly the works of Robert Johnson and Tommy Johnson.

Sony Music released two Sinners albums (even though the film was distributed by Warner Bros.). Sinners (Original Motion Picture Score) contains Goransson’s score and features Metallica drummer Lars Ulrich and blues/rock guitarist Eric Gales on individual tracks. Sinners (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack) features songs from the film performed by such musicians as Rhiannon Giddens, Buddy Guy and Brittany Howard, along with castmates. The albums were released on Sony Classical Records and Sony Masterworks, respectively, on April 18, 2025, the same day the film was released.

Additional reporting by Melinda Newman.