During the scene in Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers when Art (Mike Faist) and his doubles partner Patrick (Josh O’Connor) first watch Tashi (Zendaya) play tennis, Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ track “Yeah x10” ratchets things up to a fever pitch. The camera flips between Tashi, who’s kicking her opponent’s ass with seething intensity, and the two teenage boys, who lean back in their chairs like synchronized swimmers, utterly transfixed. I went to see Challengers with a group of female friends, and when that simultaneous lean happened, making the boys look exactly like they were dancing to Tashi’s music, this entire line of women burst out in peals of pleased, astonished laughter. That, I thought to myself, is the movies!
Well, apparently academy voters have sludge in their veins, because we found out on Thursday that Challengers was not nominated for any Oscars—not for screenplay (as I had hoped), and not even for the music. No Original Score, not even Original Song! This despite the fact that Reznor and Ross got a Golden Globe for this same score earlier this month. The nominees in the Score category are Emilia Pérez, Conclave, The Wild Robot, Wicked, and The Brutalist, which include a lot of fine compositions and many I do not remember at all. To quote the queen: “COME ON!!!!”
If we’re judging movie scores by how much their movie’s effect depends on them, this score should have skipped the nomination stage and gone straight to a win. Ross has said that the first the duo heard of Challengers was when Guadagnino emailed them a brief note: “Do you want to be on my next film? It’s going to be super sexy.’” (“Sexy,” Ross said, had “two X’s.”) The resulting score—driving techno for the tennis matches and recurrent contretemps between these three athletes stuck in a drawn-out love triangle, scattered pensive classical arrangements for moments when characters are at turning points—does exactly what the movie’s director wanted it to do: It makes you really, really horny for tennis.
I suspect that Oscars voters don’t care whether the general public adopts an original score as a listenable album in its own right. But if they do, I hope they know that multiple songs from Challengers (Original Score) have millions of streams on Spotify, and it has to be the only one of the little group of 2025 Original Score nominees and would-bes to generate its own memes. Don’t the academy members want movies to be popular?
me in the movie theater as soon as the challengers score started playing pic.twitter.com/dPK9aIQ1kg
— maria (@westsidesorry) April 27, 2024
I watched the movie again this morning (this was Challengers viewing No. 3 for me—compared to some people online, I’m still a rookie) to remind myself how the music worked in situ. The answer is still “great.” But I had to do that because this album has detached itself from its context and become a “You have to finish this blog post now” album, a “The gym is empty and you can pick what to put on the sound system” album, a “Play it in the car and tell your child a bowdlerized version of the plot of a movie she shouldn’t view for years” album. If anyone out there is getting all of that out of the score of Conclave, I’d like to meet them!
Maybe the academy thinks Reznor and Ross’ mantelpieces groan too loudly already with their Oscars from previous years. (They won Original Score for The Social Network in 2011, were nominated for Mank and Soul in 2021, and won for Soul that same year.) Or maybe a critical mass of them agree with Defector’s Chris Thompson, who hates “Yeah x10” and, apparently, fun. But the Challengers score takes what The Social Network started, on daring, standout tracks like “In Motion”—swapping out the usual brass and strings for synthesizers and a thumping four-on-the-floor beat—and builds it out to feature length. In soundtracking a drama not just partly but almost entirely with propulsive electronic dance music, Reznor and Ross tried something truly audacious—and it paid off big time.
As for that creaky mantel, do we feel, in retrospect, that John Williams should not have been nominated for his theme for Raiders of the Lost Ark, just because he’d already won for Jaws and Star Wars? Of course not! When the champ is on a roll, sometimes the best thing to do is just lean back and keep watching them win.
Get the best of movies, TV, books, music, and more.
