WSA: Greenwood, Desplat, Guðnadóttir Among Nominees
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- Alexandre Desplat leads the Film Composer of the Year field with four 2025 credits — Guillermo del Toro's "Frankenstein," "Eagles of the Republic," "Jurassic World Rebirth," and "L'homme qui rétrécit" — after reinventing John Williams motifs for the dinosaur sequel and crafting a "lyrical" symphonic score for "Frankenstein."
- Hildur Guðnadóttir will serve as the Oct. 10 ceremony's Guest of Honor while competing for Film Composer of the Year with "The Bride!," "Hedda," and "28 Years Later: The Bone Temple," spanning gothic punk, jazzy vocal tracks, and "raging mammoth horn solos."
- Jonny Greenwood earned his Film Composer nomination for the "nerve-shredding" score to Paul Thomas Anderson's "One Battle After Another," reinforcing the tension-filled orchestration style behind his earlier WSA-recognized work on "Phantom Thread" and "The Power of the Dog."
- Daniel Pemberton and Max Richter round out the five-film Film Composer shortlist — Pemberton cited for an "expansive" sci-fi palette on "Project Hail Mary" plus "The Drama," "The Bad Guys 2," and "Masters of the Universe"; Richter for Chloé Zhao's "Hamnet," where period Elizabethan instruments blend with soft vocal chants to mirror the film's grief.
- Finneas O'Connell, David Fleming, Martin Phipps, Dave Porter, and Jeff Russo are nominated for Television Composer of the Year for "Beef" Season 2, "Widow's Bay," "Steal," "Pluribus," and "Alien: Earth" — with Phipps's "Steal" score composed almost entirely on a single monophonic synthesizer.
- "Golden" from Netflix's "KPop Demon Hunters" leads the Best Original Song field on the heels of its Oscar win, competing against Charli XCX and John Cale's "House" from "Wuthering Heights," Cynthia Erivo's "No Place Like Home" from "Wicked: For Good," Guðnadóttir's "Stolen Tale" from "Hedda," and Nick Cave's title track "Train Dreams" with The National's Bryce Dessner.
- Trevor Jones receives the Lifetime Achievement Award, and a second wave of nominations — Discovery of the Year, Public Choice Award, Game Music Award, and Belgian Film Composer of the Year — will be announced Sept. 3.
Why it matters: Guðnadóttir's dual role as Guest of Honor and active Film Composer nominee is highly unusual for the WSA, effectively giving her three projects a year of elevated visibility inside one awards body. The Best Original Song slate doubles as an early screen-music scorecard: "KPop Demon Hunters" carrying its Oscar momentum into a WSA nomination signals that Netflix's original-music pipeline is being taken seriously by the voting bloc ahead of the next Emmys and Oscars cycle.
