Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross Win Second Oscar
Raise your glasses to Nine Inch Nails mastermind Trent Reznor and his closest creative collaborator of the past twenty years, Atticus Ross: last night (April 25), the duo won their second Academy Award for Best Original Score. This one for Soul — an animated Pixar movie! — and was also shared with Jon Batiste. All three composers previously won a Golden Globe for the same score.
They beat themselves, for David Fincher’s Mank, along with Terence Blanchard, for Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods; Emile Mosseri, for Minari; and James Newton Howard, for Paul Greengrass’ News of the World.
In a post-win interview with Variety, Reznor revealed that next on the docket for Ross and himself was working on new Nine Inch Nails music:
“Ten years ago, when we did The Social Network, which is the first film that we worked on, it was such a great experience. We just came out of it inspired and reenergized, and it was working on a medium we hadn’t done before and learned so much, that we felt like, ‘Hey, let’s do a Nine Inch Nails record; let’s go on tour.’
“And what we’ve tried to do since then is break it up where we do some rock music, we come back and do some film work. We’ve just done three pretty big films in Watchmen, Mank, and Soul in a row. We should be on tour but COVID has prevented that.
“We are planning on working on Nine Inch Nails material as soon as…probably tomorrow.”
You can their acceptance speech, as well as the Variety interview, below. I’ll also plop the actual Soul score down because why not.
As Reznor mentioned in the above interview, he and Ross won their first Oscar in 2011, for their work on David Fincher’s The Social Network. Since then, they’ve become a Hollywood powerhouse, snapping up not just Oscars but also Golden Globes and Emmys for their work on various film and television projects. And that’s not even getting into their induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame last year.
So congrats again to Ross and Reznor. Nine Inch Nails sure has come a long way from as my Aunt Sadie once called them, “the band with the bestiality song,” eh?
