The annual awards show inspires a tizzy of emotions in film buffs. Many of them will likely conspire not to partake in the event (or just do it separately, but at the very least all acknowledge that they are not sufficiently intrigued). Many others, like me, will be stupidly agog over any display of taste, especially considering this year's nominees, among them boatloads of nods towards any other year's best film, No Country for Old Men, as well as towards the best film in many years, There Will Be Blood.The fact is — and here I assume that there's at least one person reading who doesn't know me all that well, so forgive me if you do — cinema is a passion of mine, but it is a passion informed more than significantly by my even greater passion for music. I've been listening to and critiquing the score as a crucial, grade-dependent element of a film for years now. Listening to music is a complete act, and so is watching a film, except that when you're watching a film, you're sometimes also listening to music, and thus you're engaged in two complete acts affecting each other. I champion any film (usually these are foreign) that eschews an original score to successful effect, when so many others use it as a crutch or without even knowing why; in many cases, I conclude that a movie, even a really good one, could have been improved by better music or, at the very least, more well-thought-out usage. I only just started paying attention to the best score category at the Oscars last year. My Pulitzer-winning (not really) blog critiques on two of the year's nominees were posted on the Six-Reel Shuffle, my friends' short-lived collective web journal about whatever movies they were seeing. I wrote about Pan's Labyrinth, but here's the one I like better, about the travesty of Gustavo Santaolalla's win for Babel.This year, I saw only two of this year's nominees in the scoring category, and I'm sure I'll never see the other three, but I've sampled their soundtracks. Unwatched by me: - Atonement, composed by Dario Marianelli, the ultimate in empty baroque schmaltz, topped off by egregious typewriter effects — and, oh, "featuring piano solos" (read: endless, meandering arpeggios) "performed by Jean Yves-Thibaudet," so get excited.- The Kite Runner by Alberto Iglesias, pan-Middle-Eastern stylings that could honestly be much worse than they sound, and so I cannot comment aside from that aesthetically, the production's awfully wet and dramatic, and would sooner ask for recommendations of other Afghani/Persian/Pakistani music closer to my sensibilities. I do, however, admire Iglesias's work for Talk to Her and The Constant Gardener in particular.- 3:10 to Yuma by Marco Beltrami, dull, rote chamber textures mixed with dull, rote Western "genre" textures. Cool.The ones I did see are Ratatouille, one of my favorite movies of the year and a highly competent cartoon score by Michael Giacchino, whose score for Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World was, I note as a digression, one of the strangest and possibly worst I've witnessed in theaters. I won't argue about that nomination — cartoon music is hard! — but I will cap it off with the surprising first-ever nomination for James Newton Howard and his work on Michael Clayton, surprising because he is a hack who probably should have been nominated several times over by now. Well done to the Academy at last, since they've managed to nominate him for a film in which his soundtrack is by far the worst part. Howard's music for Michael Clayton would be better suited for a prime-time drama starring Heather Locklear, or maybe even the car commercial during it; I found it a little bit difficult to take the movie seriously when the score was on, and it actually nearly ruined the ending's otherwise refreshing impact for me.A question arises out of all this muckity muck. Exactly which of these movies has been as highly-regarded for its score as Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood? By now, it's fairly common knowledge that Jonny Greenwood's stellar work for Blood was considered "ineligible" by the Academy. If you want to see a fairly exemplary piece of unfair journalism, by the way, check out this piece on the AP about the scandal!"Turns out it wasn't eligible — because it wasn't entirely original... Some of the score came from a performance Greenwood had done for the BBC, titled 'Popcorn Superhet Receiver.' Some of it came from Estonian composer Arvo Part; still other parts came from a Brahms violin concerto." Glibly they cast Mr. Greenwood and Mr. Anderson as phonies for even suggesting that his work was worthy of Academy recognition, despite it being evident that Greenwood's work for the film was clearly substantial enough by any merit aside from irrelevant statistic-based guidelines. Then they (now speaking to both the Academy and the press) operate as if — as if! — no score intermingled with previously composed or otherwise sourced music could be up for this award. Clearly rules are made to be broken (please consult last year's Babel win; if they are trying to apologize for that, this is the wrong way to go about it). Anyone who's seen and appreciated the merits of There Will Be Blood should find this preposterous. There's a feature-length album of music written for the movie in stores; how is this much not enough?I'm going to take up a radical position, and if what I've heard from my friends who frequent film discussion boards is any indication, I could be laughed off the internet for doing this. Not only is the music in There Will Be Blood, both the amount of it and the quality, substantial enough to receive a nomination (and win) the Oscar for best score, but I will also claim an equal right to nomination — nay, a greater right than all present nominees — for Carter Burwell and the Coen Bros.' use of his music in No Country for Old Men.If you think there's no score in that movie, well, I'm not playing a trick on you; Burwell and the Coens did. There are several minutes of music in it, probably even over 10. Burwell's contribution consists entirely of synth pads swelling darkly and at times almost inaudibly. Each time it seeps through the sound design of the desert or the interior of a car, it rings utterly true to the film, contributing just that extra, near-subliminal kick to the mood of the moment. The synthesizer patches have a warm, analog-style texture, as well, helping to place the film in its era (specifically, 1980). It's as if Brian Eno edited a score by Vangelis down to a single track of the mix that Vangelis didn't even remember recording. Burwell's work for No Country is ambient, minimal, and as fitting to the movie as it is in essentially every previous effort they've done together. The film is critically decorated for almost every other aspect of its craft; the effect of its score, an already underlooked element of cinematic analysis in general, is so ambient that no one thinks it's even there. In reality, it is as unorthodox and thoughtful a technique as the editing and structure already displays. To me, this is scoring as an art. It takes the already daring "no music" aesthetic, almost completely missing from American filmmaking, and ups the ante by actually including some, and it's nice.Do I think that No Country's score is more daring than the one for There Will Be Blood? Ultimately, I do not; the stylistic breadth of Greenwood's compositions in the film, especially how good and memorable each of them are, is remarkable for a soundtrack work. It is Greenwood's first score for a traditional feature, and to be truthful, as phenomenal as the music is, my standards are high enough that I think he could even do better with another round. I hope that the Academy's outdated, wrongheaded concept of what the best of scoring can be does not discourage him from forging ahead in the field. Burwell, luckily, has already made his name with the Coens, with his excellent work for both of Spike Jonze's features, and yet more; the total snub of his oeuvre thus far is perhaps more indicative of the overall attitude the Academy has towards music than either of these films being shut out (and let's be realistic; No Country wouldn't get nominated even in a more ideal world). Yet it remains true in my estimation that both of these films, the two best of 2007 and two of the most acclaimed, have it within their bragging rights to claim a unique and exceptional approach to the soundtrack, and until this sort of effort is recognized on equal footing with the films' other achievements, the potential for the art of the score in cinema will continue to be slighted.