2021 Oscar Predictions: ORIGINAL SCORE (December)

With critics wins from Boston Online, Chicago, Florida and Los Angeles it’s an easy call to keep Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross’s score for Soul at the #1 spot. While they’re still likely to secure a second nomination with Mank (a much more out of the box score for the duo), Soul is far out in front.

News of the World and Tenet rise this month and the latest effort from 15-time Oscar nominee Thomas Newman, Let Them All Talk, enters the top 10.

Here are my ranked 2021 Oscar predictions in Original Score for December.

Green – moves up; Red – moves down; Blue – new entry this month

1. Soul (Pixar)
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (and John Batiste, if eligible)

2. Mank (Netflix)
Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross

3. News of the World (Universal Pictures)
James Newton Howard

4. Da 5 Bloods (Netflix)
Terence Blanchard

5. Minari (A24)
Emile Mosseri

6. The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Netflix)
Daniel Pemberton

7. The Midnight Sky (Netflix)
Alexandre Desplat

8. Tenet (Warner Bros)
Ludwig Göransson

9. Let Them All Talk (HBO Max)
Thomas Newman

10. Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom (Netflix)
Branford Marsalis

Other Contenders

Ammonite (Neon)
Volker Bertelmann and Dustin O’Halloran

Hillbilly Elegy (Netflix)

David Fleming and Hans Zimmer

The Life Ahead (Netflix)
Gabriel Yared

Mulan (Disney+)
Henry Gregson-Williams

One Night in Miami… (Amazon Studios)

Terence Blanchard

Over the Moon (Netflix)
Steven Price

Sound of Metal (Amazon Studios)

Abraham Marder and Nicolas Becker

The United States vs. Billie Holiday (Paramount Pictures)
Kris Bowers

Tenet image courtesy of Warner Bros

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Erik Anderson

Erik Anderson is the founder/owner and Editor-in-Chief of AwardsWatch and has always loved all things Oscar, having watched the Academy Awards since he was in single digits; making lists, rankings and predictions throughout the show. This led him down the path to obsessing about awards. Much later, he found himself in film school and the film forums of GoldDerby, and then migrated over to the former Oscarwatch (now AwardsDaily), before breaking off to create AwardsWatch in 2013.

He is a Rotten Tomatoes-approved critic, accredited by the Cannes Film Festival, Telluride Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival and more, is a member of the International Cinephile Society (ICS), The Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics (GALECA), Hollywood Critics Association (HCA) and the International Press Academy. Among his many achieved goals with AwardsWatch, he has given a platform to underrepresented writers and critics and supplied them with access to film festivals and the industry and calls the Bay Area his home where he lives with his husband and son.

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