When two-time Oscar-winning composer Alexandre Desplat goes about his work, he spends a lot of time imagining, striving for a score and a sonic world unlike any heard before. With Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs—set in a dystopian near-future Japan, and following a boy in search of his dog on an island of refuse—this…

UPDATED with video: For eight years, French composer Alexandre Desplat was always a bridesmaid and never a bride at the Oscars, with several nominations for scores to such pics like The Queen, King’s Speech and Argo. That is until 2015, when he finally won for The Grand Budapest Hotel. That was also an interesting…

French composer Alexandre Desplat arrived on the Hollywood scene in 2003-04 with back-to-back movies Girl With the Pearl Earring and Birth. Since then, the town has only asked him for more, spellbound by his ability to canvass various distinctive melodic styles, making them intrinsic and organic to a given film on…

To understand Guillermo del Toro’s core drive and thematic interest when it came to The Shape of Water, look no further than the film’s title. “[Water] takes the shape of everything. It goes through the air, it’s invisible, it’s transparent, but it still has a lot of power,” Oscar-winning composer Alexandre Desplat…

An eight-time Oscar nominee, who finally won for The Grand Budapest Hotel in 2015, prolific composer Alexandre Desplat composed scores for four of this year’s Oscar contenders, including Illumination’s animated feature The Secret Life of Pets and the Meryl Streep-starring Florence Foster Jenkins. If more than one of…

Some big names were in the winner’s circle for the seventh annual Hollywood Music in Media Awards last night. Among the composers taking home the hardware were Oscar winners Alexandre Desplat and Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross along with Justin Timberlake, John Debney and Nicholas Britell. Britell took the Original…

The eighth time is truly a charm for French composer Alexandre Desplat as he finally won an Oscar for Best Original Score after creating notes for an array of prolific Hollywood films from art house titles like The Girl With Pearl Earring to tentpoles like Godzilla. His win for Fox Searchlight’s The Grand Budapest Hote…

Composer Alexandre Desplat, whose notes have graced such Oscar-winning films as The King’s Speech and Argo in recent years, is going up against himself in the Best Score category this year. The French composer occupies two of the five composer slots for his work on the Weinstein Company's The Imitation Game and Fox…

If there's a mission that The Weinstein Co., Universal, Warner Bros., Sony and Fox Searchlight have this season, it's to make sure Alexandre Desplat wins a best score Oscar for one of their films. Ever since the French composer made a splash with his music for 2003's Girl with a Pearl Earring, he has been in demand by…

Is it Oscar season already? The Venice Film Festival has set Alexandre Desplat to head the main competition jury at the 71st Venice Film Festival. It's the first time they've set a film composer to be jury president, organizers said Monday. Desplat has the bonafides, earning six Oscar noms in the past decade…

You have to hand it to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Just as it is in the heat of putting on a little TV awards show over at the Dolby Theatre on Sunday night, the group still found time to stage the first-ever “Oscar Concert” on Thursday night at UCLA’s Royce Hall — and turn out in force. This…

Interviews by AwardsLine Editor Christy Grosz and Deputy Editor Anna Lisa Raya. Here are some of this year's lesser-known Oscar nominees, whose skills helped make the director's and actors' visions come to life. Without their research, technical mastery, or their ability to translate a story into melodies or visual…