🌀 This Oscar Was About More Than a Film Score

Three Oscars. And a score for Sinners that built its emotional spine not from a symphony orchestra in a recording studio, but from a 1932 Dobro Cyclops resonator guitar, a West African djambe drum, and a Choctaw chant.

When Ludwig Göransson walked to the podium at the 98th Academy Awards last Sunday, something shifted in what Hollywood has decided, finally, that film music is allowed to be.

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Think about the last time you heard a film described as having a "great score." Odds are, you pictured strings. A swelling orchestra. The kind of music that makes you feel, without quite knowing why, that you are watching something important. That feeling has been carefully trained into us over a century of cinema, and it did not arrive from nowhere.

The Western orchestral tradition that dominates Hollywood scoring was always a cultural choice that got mistaken for a universal standard. Composers from Beethoven to Bernard Herrmann were held up as the definition of musical sophistication, and that definition was then exported globally through the film industry's enormous commercial reach.

Other musical traditions, including the blues, West African drumming, Indigenous chant, and countless others, were treated as color, as texture, as something you might sprinkle in to signal that a story was set somewhere "exotic." They were never treated as the architecture itself.

What changes when they are?

Sinners is set in the Mississippi Delta in 1932, during Jim Crow, during the height of blues culture, during a period when Black Americans were building one of the most consequential musical traditions in human history under conditions of brutal oppression. Ryan Coogler's film wanted to honor that, and Göransson's score had to do the same. The question was how.

The answer he arrived at was not to simulate authenticity. It was to pursue it with the rigor of someone who understood what was at stake.

Göransson traveled from Memphis to Clarksdale with Coogler, members of the music team, and his own father, a blues guitarist who had raised him on this music from the age of six. They met with blues musicians. They did not phone it in.

Göransson hunted down three rare 1932 Dobro Cyclops resonator guitars, finding one in London, one in Nashville, and one in Los Angeles, because the score had to carry the physical memory of the era. He wrote much of it on that guitar because, in his own words, he wanted the music "to sound like the room, like the South breathing in pain."

That is a composer thinking like a historian.

But the score does not stop at the Delta. Göransson blended his work with instruments chosen to represent the different ethnic groups and cultural histories of the film's characters. For the Irish vampire characters, he collaborated with Gaelic music specialist Iarla Ó Lionáird, who brought fiddles, pennywhistles, accordions, and Irish frame drums.

He used a West African djambe hand drum as a musical bridge between the blues and the African music of the characters' ancestors. And in one key scene, a Choctaw chanter appears as a recurring musical signal for the Native American characters hunting the film's villain.

Each of these is a deliberate act of restoration. These are instruments and traditions that Western classical music spent centuries treating as primitive, as background, as raw material to be refined by European hands before it could be taken seriously. Göransson puts them at the center and asks the audience to feel what that means.

The film's crucial musical sequence makes this explicit in a way that is almost overwhelming. The "Surreal Montage" built around the song "I Lied to You" includes a West African griot, a hereditary musician and oral historian, playing a forerunner to the banjo, a guitarist channeling Jimi Hendrix, a DJ running an 1980s hip-hop beat, West Coast R&B, an African drummer, a Chinese dancer, a ballet dancer, and a battle between an African ancestral dancer and a contemporary hip-hop dancer.

The scene spans centuries of musical evolution in a single continuous piece of music. It opens in acoustic Delta Blues and moves through traditional African percussion, blues guitar, psychedelic rock, electronic drum beats, and the laid-back groove of 1990s West Coast rap, not as a mashup or a medley, but as a single continuous piece of music that undergoes transformation while remaining recognizably itself.

What Göransson understood, and what the scene makes viscerally clear, is that these are not separate traditions. They are one tradition that was broken apart by history and is being stitched back together here, in a juke joint, in a horror film, at the Academy Awards.

Consider the banjo. Most audiences associate it with country and bluegrass music. But the banjo is an African instrument, and the original players were griots. Enslaved people brought it to the American South, where it was gradually absorbed into white musical traditions that erased its origins entirely. When Göransson includes a griot playing the banjo's ancestor in that montage, he is not adding an interesting detail. He is correcting the historical record. He is returning the instrument to its source.

This is what the concept of sending the sound back to its origins looks like in practice. A scene in a film that 16 million people watched. That is how cultural memory gets restored.

Here is the uncomfortable part: Ludwig Göransson is Swedish. He grew up in suburban Stockholm. His introduction to Delta Blues came through his father's record collection, not through any lived connection to Mississippi or to Blackness or to the communities whose music this score honors. And he is the one collecting the Oscar.

That tension does not disappear because the work is good, and Sinners is genuinely good. Ryan Coogler, who is a Black American man with family roots in Mississippi, wrote and directed the film and has collaborated with Göransson since their time at USC together.

That partnership matters.

Coogler's creative authority over the project is not in question. But the film industry's pattern of routing recognition toward white European composers, even when the subject matter is explicitly about suppressed Black cultural history, is worth sitting with rather than explaining away.

The question of who benefits when suppressed traditions finally get their Hollywood close-up is not resolved by the quality of the result. It gets more complicated when the result is genuinely good.

For a century, film music told audiences which sounds were worth feeling something about. Sinners suggests the opposite: that the sounds we were taught to ignore have been carrying the weight of history all along, and that restoring them to the screen is not a stylistic choice. It is a reckoning.

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