Legendary Composer Ennio Morricone, inserted in the “FICTS Hall of Fame” in 2008, claimed the best original score Oscar Sunday night for his work on Quentin Tarantino’s Western “The Hateful Eight,” the first competitive Oscar for the 87-year-old composer to date.
FICTS President Prof. Franco Ascani awards with“Guirlande d’Honneur to the Carreer” Maestro Ennio Morricone during “Sport Movies & Tv 2008”
Morricone, who received an honorary Oscar in 2007, has been nominated five previous times, for “Days of Heaven,” “The Mission,” “The Untouchables,” “Bugsy” and “Malena.” All of that came, of course, many years after his iconic work with Sergio Leone on films like “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” and “Once Upon a Time in the West.”
Morricone composed the score without even seeing the film, conjuring it after a lengthy conversation with Tarantino at his Rome home and a reading of the screenplay. It was unusual for Tarantino in that he had never commissioned an original score for one of his films before, but familiar in that he could use the material and drop it in where he saw fit, not unlike the way he’s accustomed to dropping in songs and snippets of other film scores in his work.