For Diane Warren, the 17th time may be the charm for taking home her first Oscar, while The National’s Bryce Dessner and composers Nicholas Pike and Max Richter are all celebrating their first nominations. For two time-Oscar winner Alexandre Desplat, it’s a chance to add another trophy.
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They all may have approached writing for their nominated projects differently, but on Thursday (Jan. 22), the original score and original song honorees are all united on feeling the joy of hearing their name called when the 2026 Oscar nominations were announced at 8:30 a.m. ET this morning.
Billboard talked to a number of the nominees shortly after they learned of their nominations. Below are condensed highlights from the interviews.
Bryce Dessner, “Train Dreams,” Train Dreams (original song)
Clint Bentley’s Train Dreams is such a minimalist film with the emphasis on the cinematography and small acting ensemble that the director and the film’s composer, The National’s Bryce Dessner, questioned if it even needed a song, but the pair ultimately decided it did. “It felt like [the song] had to kind of walk a careful line of feeling part of the film, which feels so closely related to the book, and this universe in which it lives,” says Dessner.
Nick Cave was Bentley’s first choice to write the lyrics and perform the song. “He’s obviously a huge hero of mine, of my band, and someone we’ve listened to forever,” Dessner says. “It was not something I had imagined doing because how would we get to him?” But it turns out Cave was a huge fan of the book the movie is based on. “[Nick] called me and just said, ‘Look, I really want this to feel part of the world you created. Can you send me some music to work with? I sent him a piece that then he was able to write over and that’s how it happened. Sometimes beautiful profound things are fairly effortless. I think that, basically, Nick had a dream, woke up and wrote the lyrics. It just came together quite quickly. A couple days [later] in the studio he asked me if I had any notes. I said, ‘Don’t change your thing.’”
Dessner says he and Cave have no future plans to work together, though he would be open to it. “This is just such a joy,” he says. “Having my name on an Oscar nomination with Nick is such a big honor.”
Alexandre Desplat, Frankenstein (original score)
Desplat considers Frankenstein the “third movement of the triptych” with director Guillermo Del Toro, following Pinocchio and The Shape of Water. “They are all about the creatures and being able to receive love to give love and create empathy, so there’s some kind of line going through these three scores and these three movies. Each time it’s how do you bring the audience to understand and love the creature?”
To represent humanity, Desplat chose “the smallest, tiniest, most beautiful and most difficult instrument, which is the violin,” which plays as the movie opens and creates the sound of the creature for the film. “Of course, it will get bigger and operatic and huge with a symphonic choir but keeps going back and forth between this very intimate, gentle sound and the huge symphonic sound.” Desplat and Del Toro had decided on the solo violin motif long before shooting for the movie even began. “We wanted the avoid the obvious, avoid the horror film, avoid the scary and we knew that we needed to be touched, moved by the creature. Very early on, we spoke about using a string instrument because the creature is a huge thing and we need to have a counterpoint with this instrument.”
Over the course of their work together, the two have developed complete trust. “Guillermo likes music in cinema and that makes a huge difference because when the composer comes near him, he allows him to do whatever he wants as long as it brings the dramaturgy and the characters int a wider level of emotion. And so, it’s really a flawless [process.]”
With 12 nominations and two wins, Desplat says it is still a thrill to be nominated. “It’s fabulous!,” he says. “It’s amazing each time. I’m so grateful.”
Nicholas Pike, “Sweet Dreams of Joy,” Viva Verdi! (original song)
Writing an aria for the closing of Viva Verdi!, an independent documentary that shines a light on the elderly opera singers and musicians who live in Milan’s Casa Verdi retirement home (built by the composer in 1896) and mentor young music students, opened up a whole new path for Pike. “I can’t say I was a huge opera fan or going to the opera all the time,” he says before writing the song, but he found the process so enjoyable, he has written more arias for upcoming films and is now entertaining the idea of writing an opera that could hopefully appeal to a younger audience to “This is a passion of mine at the moment,” he says, adding the film “really brought all that to life. Ideally, I would get a commission of some sort.”
Pike, who also scored the documentary, wrote “Sweet Dreams of Joy” based on a 12-minute snippet of the film sent to him by producer Christine La Monte. “It was so inspiring, it was so full of humanity and music and energy, that I literally walked over to the piano and wrote the piece without any thought of would it end up in the film,” he says. “It was just so moving I had to write the piece. The lyrics took me a little longer to finesse them, but, really, it was just pure inspiration.”
Soprano Ava Maria Martinez sang the aria after the original singer came down with bronchitis. After the singer fell ill, Pike says he was “complaining bitterly” to his engineer who suggested Martinez who had worked with her for series Mozart in the Jungle. It went so well that Pike pledged to her that “I wasn’t going to rest until you’re singing on the Oscars stage.”
Max Richter, Hamnet (original score)
For Richter, his score to the Golden Globe winner for best motion picture-drama had to coordinate with the natural elements of the film. “The voice of the forest and of the earth, they’re really a big part of the overall texture of the film,” he says. “It was almost like a conversation between those natural sounds and the score and dialogue. It was like trying to find very, very minimal kinds of ways for the music, just to kind of make things glow just a little bit.”
The Chloe Zhou-directed movie looks at William Shakespeare and his wife Agnes’ courtship, marriage and subsequent loss of a child that leads Shakespeare to write Hamlet.
Richter was deliberately “very sparing” in his musical choices to let the “powerful, very emotional material speak on its own terms without trying to direct us as the audience in any particular way.” He also brought in renowned Renaissance choir, Tenebrae, “but I transformed those vocal recordings in the computer into a sort of haunted, ghostly version of those vocals.” He also used Elizabethan string instruments in keeping with the period, but “we hear them as altered, refracted ghostly versions of themselves.”
For all the dark topics Hamnet addresses, Richter says working on the movie was nothing but a joyous experience. “It really is a special project to me because very often you may work on a film and the film will turn out great, but the project was a nightmare, right? That was not the case with Hamnet. The vibes on that set were just amazing.”
Diane Warren, “Dear Me,” Relentless (original song)
Out of all the songs that Warren has written for films, “Dear Me” included a first: “I’ve never written a song about myself,” she says.
“Dear Me,” the hopeful, inspiring end-title song performed by Kesha that accompanies the documentary about the 17-time Oscar-nominated songwriter, draws from what Warren would tell her younger self.
“I was a lonely, misunderstood, bullied kid that spent a lot of time in my room by myself when I wasn’t being kicked out of school or things like that,” she says. “What I wanted to do was tell that young girl sitting in a room and picking up a guitar and maybe writing her first song that, ‘Hey, you know what? You’re going to be OK. You don’t know it now, but you’re going to be all right.’”
Warren’s most personal song turned out to be her most universal. “It’s resonated with so many people because we all have that kid inside us,” she says. Even the third graders who came into her studio to sing on it related to the message, she says. “They said, ‘This song is giving me hope. This is making me tell myself it’s going to be OK.’”
Kesha was her first choice to sing the song as she “cast” the role. “They have to be authentic to the movie and to the song. You have to have both,” she said. “I’ve known Kesha for a while and I’m so aware she’s an amazing singer. I also knew she’s gone through a lot of stuff so I knew it would resonate with her. She came to my studio and was crying when she heard it and that’s how I knew. There was no other choice.”
Warren is behind only Sammy Cahn and Johnny Mercer in receiving the most nominations in the best song category. “That makes me feel pretty cool,” she says. “They’ve won a couple of those, right?” The answer is yes, with Warren hoping 17 is her lucky number to finally take home a trophy. “I’m not gonna lie and say I wouldn’t like to win, especially with this song from this movie. Who knows, right?”
