At the 96th Academy Awards on March 10, the most heartwarming music news was the Oscar win by the documentary short “The Last Repair Shop.”
The film tells the story of four master craftsmen who repair musical instruments for Los Angeles Unified School District students. Working in the largest remaining workshop of its kind in the country, the four oversee the maintenance of some 80,000 instruments for the city’s schoolchildren.
The moving personal stories of the craftsmen and students are told in the documentary directed by Ben Proudfoot and Kris Bowers and distributed by LA Times Studios and Searchlight Pictures.
Accepting the prize, Bowers said, “Music education isn’t just about creating incredible musicians — it’s about creating incredible humans.”
Proudfoot previously won the same prize for the 2021 short “The Queen of Basketball,” and he and Bowers were nominated in the same category at the 93rd Academy Awards for co-directing “A Concerto Is a Conversation.”
During the three-hour show on Sunday night, awards were announced for music and sound in three categories — Best Original Song, Best Original Score, and Best Sound.
Instead of separate categories for mixing and editing, there has been one consolidated award for Best Sound for several years now.
And last month, the Academy handed out a number of special Scientific and Engineering Awards, highlighting laser projection and open-source workflow projects that have influenced the film industry.
These were the results from Sunday:
Best Original Score: Ludwig Göransson won for Oppenheimer, over American Fiction, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Poor Things.
Best Original Song: Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell won for “What Was I Made For?” from Barbie, over “The Fire Inside” (Flamin’ Hot), “It Never Went Away” (American Symphony), and “Wahzhazhe (A Song for My People)” (Killers of the Flower Moon).
Best Sound: Tarn Willers and Johnnie Burn won for The Zone of Interest, over The Creator, Maestro, Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One, and Oppenheimer.
The most “music-oriented” film of the year, Maestro, a biopic about Leonard Bernstein, continued its downward spiral through various award shows, not winning an Oscar in any of the categories in which it was nominated.
The usual memorial segment to honor those who died during the past year was accompanied by Andrea Bocelli and his son Matteo Bocelli singing “Time to Say Goodbye,” with dancers in the background.
Music and dance did little to rescue the segment, which rushed through the obituary notices, with tiny photos flashed for a second or so, identified with mostly illegible text. It was a botched part of an otherwise good Academy Awards night.
