Jonny Greenwood loses a third score Oscar as his film wins Best Picture

Ludwig Göransson won Best Original Score for Sinners at the 98th Academy Awards at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles on Sunday 15 March, beating Jonny Greenwood's score for One Battle After Another. It is Greenwood's third Oscar nomination and his third defeat, after Phantom Thread in 2018 and The Power of the Dog in 2022. The score that might have won him one, There Will Be Blood, was ruled ineligible because it reused music he had written before, parts of “Popcorn Superhet Receiver” among them.

Paul Thomas Anderson's film still won six Oscars: Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay for Anderson, Supporting Actor for Sean Penn, Casting for Cassandra Kulukundis and Film Editing for Andy Jurgensen. It had 13 nominations when the list came out on 22 January, against a record 16 for Sinners.

This is Göransson's third Oscar, after Black Panther and Oppenheimer, and his Sinners score has now beaten Greenwood's at the Critics' Choice Awards, the Golden Globes, the SCL Awards and the BAFTAs. In January David Fear made the case in Rolling Stone that this should be the one to win, while allowing it might not be Greenwood's best score.

Anderson told Forbes that Greenwood had the script from the start and that the music he was writing was played against the dailies as they shot. Rolling Stone traces their partnership to the 2003 Rotterdam film festival, where Anderson ducked out of the rain into a screening of Bodysong. Years later he tried a bootleg of “Popcorn Superhet Receiver”, the piece Greenwood wrote for the BBC Concert Orchestra, over footage from There Will Be Blood. [Paul] wrote to me, and I'd not heard of him, and he said, 'Can I use this in the film, and will you write some more?'⁵ Greenwood told the New Yorker in 2021.

Jonny Greenwood at the Oscars