Final 2020 Oscar Predictions – ORIGINAL SCORE

It’s going to happen again. Thomas Newman, a 15-time Oscar nominee (14 for Score, one for Song) is going to lose Original Score for a Sam Mendes film that’s winning Best Picture.

After two years in a row where we saw longtime nominees like Roger Deakins and Kevin O’Connor finally become Oscar winners it seemed like Newman’s road to a little gold man was set.

But he won’t be losing to his cousin Randy, also nominated here (for Marriage Story) and a 22-time nominee/two-time Oscar winner. Nope, he’ll be losing to Hildur Guðnadóttir for her Critics Choice, Golden Globe, BAFTA and Society of Composers and Lyricists-winning score of Joker.

Guðnadóttir’s score is a powerful, pulsating masterpiece and her win will be historic; we haven’t had a female winner in this category in over 20 years. She’ll be the first since the Academy merged the (short lived, after going through more changes than any other Oscar category) previously split Comedy and Drama Score categories in 2000 (incidentally, the year after Newman lost for American Beauty) into one. I’m not completely ruling out a Newman win for 1917, it’s definitely possible. But even with the film’s near sweep of BAFTA, Newman’s score was one of only two losses the film took. There would have to be a rooted, concerted effort by the Academy to change that.

Here are my ranked Final Oscar predictions for Original Score.

• Author
• Recent Posts

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), Critics Choice Association (CCA), San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle (SFBAFCC) 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.

Latest posts by Erik Anderson (see all)

• ‘Jay Kelly,’ ‘Hamnet,’ ‘Pluribus,’ ‘Task’ and More on AFI’s Top 10 Films and Television of 2025 Lists - December 4, 2025
• ‘Frankenstein’ to Receive Visionary Honor from Palm Springs International Film Awards - December 4, 2025
• Robert Yeoman to be Honored with American Society of Cinematographers’ Lifetime Achievement Award - December 3, 2025