I generally try to ignore film opinion pieces I think are fundamentally misguided — à chacun son goût and all that, plus the fact that fighting one mind is generally more trouble than it’s worth — but Ben Walsh’s idle article in The Independent today on the supposed demise of the movie soundtrack does such an absurd disservice to the current landscape of film music that it can’t pass without objection.
Walsh’s standpoint is a dully nostalgic one: movie scores were so much more memorable in the old days, when greats like John Williams, Ennio Morricone and Danny Elfman (who are all dead, apparently) conjured whistle-ready themes by the dozen, while scores today “seem so completely unmemorable” by comparison.
His pool of case studies for this assertion is a shallow one — he speaks mainly of the recent Oscar winners by Best Picture, Original Score and Original Song, oddly conflating the last two categories as if the two disciplines are somehow comparable — and even through that narrow prism, his preferences are hard to justify.
A 
That seems to be the possibility put forth in 
Before we close the book on 2009, here’s one last rundown of our interviews with this year’s Oscar recipients. It was lovely to meet with them all as this was truly, for the most part, a season of camaraderie.
Tonight’s the big night, and as we close in on the final hours of the 2009-2010 film awards season, I thought I’d offer up this list (another one!), which reflects how you, the readership, would like the night’s festivities to go. These are the results of the 
And so it comes to this: more months than I care to count of watching, thinking, sweating, fretting, writing, deleting and occasionally not caring boil down to single predictions in 24 categories. There’s a lot to get through here, and I’m not going to delay things with an introduction.
As I look over my final predictions for tomorrow night’s Oscar ceremony, I notice that I’ve made only one change — in the Best Live Action Short category — since taking my 
And here we are. With one day until the Oscar ceremony, we wrap up our Oscar Guide series with a look at the 10 nominations for Best Picture. Yes, 10. The Academy decided to pump up the intrigue by expanding its Best Picture field this year in an attempt at securing some love for more populist films with a wider audience, and it seems to have worked.
Best Original Screenplay: 2009’s most difficult category to predict. Why? Certainly not because of each contender’s merits (when does that ever come into play with the Academy). No, this field is a hair-puller because you have a vibrant, likable personality up against the Best Picture frontrunner, always a recipe for a close race (and, sometimes, a recipe for upset).
I think everyone who has seen Pixar’s 
For years the composers of the music branch tended to be a bit insular. Impressive newcomer talent was often ignored while the usual suspects showed up year after year. Not long ago, there seemed to be a shift, yielding slates much like the one we have for 2009.
The writing, in case you hadn’t already read it, is on the wall.
This year marked the first year in recent memory that the Motion Picture Sound Editors offered up its list of nominees prior to the Oscar nominations announcement rather than after. Generally that batch of tea leaves is therefore elusive for those of us looking for indicators along the way.
Friday we spotlighted the film editing category in our daily Oscar Guide feature. Tonight at the Beverly Hilton, the editors themselves had their say at the 60th annual ACE Eddies ceremony.
Back in a November installment of Off the Carpet, I