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AWARDS DATABASE
All of the winners, all of the nominees, all of the awards shows.
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AWARDS 
Versatile:
Clint Eastwood has won two Oscars for directing, and with his elegiac "Grace is Gone" score, he could be nominated as a composer as well.
(Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times) Pitch perfect: These composers strike the right note.Film music can't be too sharp or too flat
The composer Igor Stravinsky once described film music in terms of its "wallpaper function." It should have the same relationship to the drama, he said, that "somebody's piano playing in my living room has to the book I am reading." A film score is, almost by definition, background music, but Stravinsky's formulation grossly understates the role of music in advancing, enriching or even transforming a narrative.
The first rule of film music is that the music must above all serve the film. The best scores, in the tradition of Bernard Herrmann and Ennio Morricone, do exactly that, while asserting their independence as self-contained compositions. The thing about great background music is it functions equally well in the foreground. CLINT EASTWOOD Clint Eastwood has composed the score for four of his films (among them "Mystic River" and "Million Dollar Baby") and contributed songs to many of his own soundtracks, but "Grace Is Gone" represents a rare first in the career of the 77-year-old multi-tasker -- the first time he has written music for someone else's movie. Harvey Weinstein called Eastwood a few months ago and asked if he'd consider re-scoring "Grace," a film by writer-director James C. Strouse that the Weinstein Co. had acquired at Sundance this year. (When the film played at the festival, it had a score by Max Richter.) Eastwood sat down with his wife one night to watch the movie, a tear-jerker starring John Cusack (who also executive produced) as a former Army man who can't bear to tell his two young daughters that their mother has been killed in action in Iraq. "We were quite moved," he said, "so I called Harvey and said, 'I'll come up with something. See if you like it. If not, no hard feelings.'" Eastwood's music for "Grace Is Gone" is in the vein of his other scores: spare, subtle and elegiac. "I think they came to me because they wanted something on the restrained side," Eastwood said. So does this mean Eastwood, who has directed nearly a film a year this decade (he's now shooting his 28th feature, "The Changeling"), is taking calls for scoring work? "I'm not actively soliciting," he said. "But if the material's interesting and if I could be of some benefit, I would consider it."
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