FINAL 2022 Oscar Predictions: ORIGINAL SCORE

With the Golden Globe, Critics’ Choice and BAFTA in hand, the long-awaited second Oscar win for Hans Zimmer is finally within reach.

Zimmer won for Disney’s 1994 animated version of The Lion King (his second nomination) and has been nominated 10 more times since then, including his current nomination for Dune. That isn’t to say that Jonny Greenwood (The Power of the Dog) and Germaine Franco (Encanto) won’t offer some competition to the veteran composer. Greenwood hit every precursor but wasn’t able to nab a win but of the 12 nominations his film has, his category ranks high as a possibility. For Franco, she’s the first Latina to score a Disney film and the first ever to earn an Oscar nomination for it. She also pulled off a Society of Composers and Lyricists (SCL) win over all of her Oscar competition. Is that enough? Probably not, as the org is just three years old and hasn’t shown any might the way a BAFTA win would. But, the way Encanto is a guild monster and the songs and soundtrack are chart toppers. Peaking right in the middle of voting means it’s not impossible.

Here are my ranked final Oscar predictions in Original Score.

1. Dune (Warner Bros/HBO Max) – GG, CCA, HMMA (Sci-Fi), SCL, BAFTA
Hans Zimmer

2. The Power of the Dog (Netflix) – GG, CCA, HMMA, SCL, BAFTA
Jonny Greenwood

3. Encanto (Walt Disney) – GG, SCL
Germaine Franco

4.  Don’t Look Up (Netflix) – CCA, HMMA, SCL, BAFTA
Nicholas Britell

5. Parallel Mothers (Sony Pictures Classics) – GG, HMMA (Foreign Language), SCL
Alberto Iglesias

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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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