The Hollywood Music in Media Awards announced its 2026 nominees on Monday, Nov. 2, and the list tells you something about where film music is heading: the scores and songs drawing the most attention are the ones that refuse to pick a lane. Ludwig Göransson’s work on The Odyssey earned three nominations, and Taylor Swift and Jack Antonoff’s “I Knew It, I Knew You” from Toy Story 5 picked up a nod in the song – animated film category, per Billboard.
That combination, a symphonic epic and a chart-built pop tune, is not a coincidence. It is the shape of the season.
The Hybrid Score Takes Center Stage
Göransson’s three nods for The Odyssey cover the score, the song “When I’m Home,” and the song’s music video. The track was co-written with James Blake, Travis Scott and Christopher Nolan, a credit line that reads less like a traditional film-music team and more like a festival bill. Billboard reports that both “I Knew It, I Knew You” and The Odyssey are thought to be the front-runners for the Oscar for best original song and best original score, respectively.
The calculus here is straightforward. Göransson won two HMMAs last year for Sinners and then went on to win both the Oscar and the Golden Globe for best original score. A composer who can move from that kind of critical run to a Christopher Nolan epic with Travis Scott on the writing credits is not working in a silo. He is working the whole board.
Genre-Blending Is Now the Baseline
Michael, the Michael Jackson project, is among the films leading the nominations with three each, alongside Behemoth!, The Odyssey, Brother Verses Brother and Linda Perry: Let It Die Here. A film built around a pop icon’s catalog sitting level with a Greek epic and an original musical-horror hybrid is the trend in miniature: the categories no longer sort cleanly into “orchestral” and “pop.”
The individual leaderboard reinforces it. Daniel Pemberton and Mina Samy received the most nominations with four each. Pemberton was recognized for his scores for Project Hail Mary and The Drama, the series Slow Horses, and the song “Let Me Sell You a Dream” from Musk, which he co-wrote with David Byrne. Samy earned nods for his scores for Ezma and the short film Stopped, plus both the score and main title theme for the foreign-language series The Death Ward.
Diane Warren, meanwhile, earned a nomination for “One Right Here” from Maserati: The Brothers, performed by Andrea Bocelli and Jennifer Hudson. Warren won her second HMMA last year for “Dear Me” from Diane Warren: Relentless. A songwriter with that kind of awards history sharing a ballot with Swift, Scott and Byrne is the point: the tent is wide now.
Why the HMMA Ballot Matters
The HMMAs honor composers, songwriters, music supervisors and artists across film, television, video games and other visual media. The organization was the first to include Outstanding Music Supervision as a featured award category, and its nominations and winners have historically been representative of key awards shows announced months later.
The track record is concrete. Last year’s HMMA-winning song “Golden” from K-Pop Demon Hunters and the score for Sinners both went on to win Oscars. Past HMMA winners who later took Academy Awards include Billie Eilish and FINNEAS for “What Was I Made For?” from Barbie and “No Time to Die,” Clément Ducol, Camille and Jacques Audiard for “El Mal” from Emilia Pérez, and Lady Gaga, Mark Ronson, Anthony Rossomando and Andrew Wyatt for “Shallow” from A Star Is Born. On the score side, HMMA winners who went on to Oscars include Göransson for Sinners and Black Panther, Hans Zimmer for Dune, Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross and Jon Batiste for Soul, and Hildur Guðnadóttir for Joker.
That pipeline is why the Nov. 2 announcement functions as an early map. The Oscar nominations will be announced on Jan. 21, nearly three months after the HMMA ceremony. For readers who follow the awards race, the HMMA ballot is the first real signal of which scores and songs have industry traction before the guilds and the Academy weigh in.
What This Signals for the Next Wave
The composer nominee list itself is a study in range: John Williams, Randy Newman, Hans Zimmer, Michael Giacchino, Danny Elfman and Carter Burwell appear alongside Damon Albarn, Devonté Hynes, Son Lux and Volker Bertelmann. That mix of legacy orchestral craftsmen and artists with pop, rock and electronic backgrounds is the broader stakes. Young composers coming up now are not being asked to choose between a symphony and a synthesizer. The ballot rewards the ones who can do both.
The 17th annual Hollywood Music in Media Awards will be held on Wednesday, Nov. 18 at the historic Avalon Hollywood, 1735 Vine Street. Special performances are to be announced, and tickets are on sale through TicketTailor.com. The Oscar nominations follow on Jan. 21.
Sources
- Hollywood Music in Media Awards
- Taylor Swift & Jack Antonoff, Ludwig Göransson Nominated for Hollywood Music in Media Awards: Full List
- Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus among 2026 Hollywood Music in Media Awards nominees
- Taylor Swift, Ludwig Göransson Lead 2026 Hollywood Music In Media Awards Contenders
- The 2026 Hollywood Music In Media Awards (HMMA) Nominations
- Nominees for Hollywood Music In Media Awards Include Taylor Swift's 'Toy Story 5' Song and More – Awards Radar
Photo: PhilipRomano (CC BY-SA 4.0)
