The 2026 Academy Award nominations were announced today, and with them, the contenders for Best Original Song. This year's nominees are Nick Cave and Bryce Dessner's "Train Dreams" (from the film of the same name), Huntr/x's "Golden" ( KPop Demon Hunters), Raphael Saadiq and Ludwig Göransson's "I Lied to You" ( Sinners), Dianne Warren's "Dear Me" ( Dianne Warren: Relentless), and Nicholas Pike's "Sweet Dreams of Joy" ( Viva Verdi!).
Among the Best Score shortlist nominees are Nine Inch Nails for Tron: Ares, Daniel Lopatin (Oneohtrix Point Never) for Marty Supreme, Kangding Ray for Sirât, Bryce Dessner for Train Dreams, Max Richter for Hamnet, Jonny Greenwood for One Battle After ­Another, and Ludwig Göransson for Sinners. As for Best Song, shortlist nominees include Nine Inch Nails' "As Alive As You Need Me To Be" from Tron: Ares, Nick Cave's theme song to Train Dreams, Miley Cyrus' "Dream As One" from Avatar: Fire and Ash, Ariana Grande's "The Girl in the Bubble" from Wicked: For Good, Billy Idol's "Dying to Live" from Billy Idol Should Be Dead, and more.
Miley Cyrus has released "Dream as One," a new song that she made for the new movie Avatar: Fire and Ash. Cyrus co-wrote and co-produced the track with Andrew Wyatt and Mark Ronson, and it has additional contributions from Jonathan Wilson, Simon Franglen, Brandon Bost, and others. Listen to "Dream as One (From Avatar: Fire and Ash)" below. Avatar: Fire and Ash is the third installment in director James Cameron's Avatar franchise.
But now an artistic group from Austin, Texas, called Silents Synced and its director Josh Frank are offering a new approach to silent cinema: showing classics to music by established stars. This one, Radiohead X Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror puts Murnau's 1922 vampire classic Nosferatu with Radiohead's Kid A from 2000 and Amnesiac from 2001. But I just couldn't make friends with this fundamentally wrong-headed idea.
One technique powerfully employed in the film has the incongruous name of "Mickey Mousing." Named after the manner in which classic cartoons were scored in tight synchrony with the movements of their characters, it had fallen into disuse by the nineteen-seventies, when a subtler cinematic style prevailed.
"Cristobal Tapia de Veer's score in Smile contrasts disorienting soundscapes with moments of intense musicality, effectively enhancing the film's horror elements through innovative compositions."
