I agree with your comment. Many films have a great symphonic soundtrack written by great composers, and said composers will have other opportunities to win an Oscar for another great soundtrack. From Prokofiev to Hans Zimmer cinema has been served by a bunch of superb classical music composers.
But here we're playing on another ground, it's a jazz soundtrack, and not just a jazzy one like in many other films. Apart from 'Round Midnight I can only think of Bird and The Naked Lunch as movies featuring such fine jazz music.
So the academy decided they should give the Oscar to this score, because true jazz isn't used so often in cinema.

It deserved to win the Oscar despite the outstanding score from The Mission. Herbie Hancock wrote a great score and the music fit the movie prefectly. He didn't play exacty in the Bud Powell style as the piano player in the movie, but then the movie wasn't centered on the piano player but the fictional sax player Dale Turner (who lived a life much like Bud did in Paris from 1959-64).

Exactly right!

just the song "berangere" is enough to win for best soundtrack, let alone the entire soundtrack itself.

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I'd never heard of this film before now. I just wanted to see what film took the oscar from Morricone. If it beat that, it ought to be the finest score in history.

totally agree with you aka-ed .. sometimes donkeys and trolls like to talk smack about deserving awards .. get a pair of ears and quit complaining is what i say to them

The jazz players on this soundtrack are all strong improvisatory soloists, an entirely different kind of music than the usual "film score," and in no way comparable to Morricone or Goldsmith. Both of those men are genius composers and deserve their shelves-ful of nominations and awards. But, in recreating a momentous period of jazz history, Hancock created a unique jazz document with its own historical importance, that also fulfilled its purpose as film score damn-near-perfectly.

You could also say they stole it from Jerry Goldsmith's Hoosiers. Both the Mission and Hoosiers had better scores than this movie but its nothing new.
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