Oscars: Robbie Robertson Finally Gets Nominated, for ‘Killers of the Flower Moon’

Kory Grow
·3 min read
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Robbie Robertson. - Credit: Sacha Lecca for Rolling Stone
Robbie Robertson. - Credit: Sacha Lecca for Rolling Stone

Robbie Robertson, the late singer-songwriter best known for his work with the Band and Bob Dylan, was nominated for an Oscar in the Original Score category for his contributions to Killers of the Flower Moon on Tuesday. The posthumous honor was Robertson’s first after decades of composing music for film.

Like many of his past scores, the music complemented a film by his longtime friend Martin Scorsese. Robertson formed a friendship with the filmmaker toward the end of the Band’s run; Scorsese filmed their final concert, the all-star bash known as The Last Waltz, on Thanksgiving Day, 1976.

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He subsequently contributed music to Scorsese’s The King of Comedy (1982), The Color of Money (1986), and The Irishman (2019). He also worked in the music department on the filmmaker’s Casino (1995), Gangs of New York (2002), Shutter Island (2010), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), and Silence (2016).

Scorsese fondly recalled the mutual understanding he shared with Robertson in a tribute he penned for Rolling Stone. “We found a common language,” he wrote. “Listening to cicadas, for Silence. Cicadas in early September in Kyushu, cicadas in late August in Hokkaido, all different kinds of sounds of cicadas in different parts of Japan and at different times of year. They even made their way into Killers of the Flower Moon. … I said, ‘Give me something dangerous and fleshy.’ For the moment when Leo [DiCaprio] drops off Lily [Gladstone] from his cab at her house in Killers of the Flower Moon. Robbie came back with a theme driven by guitar, bass, harmonica — dangerous and fleshy. More than I asked for. It helped drive the whole picture.

“There had to be another theme,” he continued, “expansive and bold, something that would match the scale of the landscape itself, the prairies and the hills. He came back with a gusher of sound, to match the oil shooting up from the earth … coyotes and wolf calls.”

In addition to Robertson’s score nod, Killers of the Flower Moon received nine additional Oscar nominations. These include Best Picture, Best Director, and Acting nods to Robert De Niro and Lily Gladstone, among others. Gladstone, the first Native American to be nominated in the Best Actress category, won the Golden Globe in the same category earlier this year.

The film dramatizes the true crime story chronicled in author David Grann’s 2017 book of the same name. In the early 1920s, several Osage people died by murder after inheriting headrights to oil money. An investigation by the fledgling Bureau of Investigation revealed a tenuous relationship between the Native and white populations in Osage County, Oklahoma.

Gladstone told Rolling Stone this month that she will maintain her relationship with the Osage nation after depcting them on screen. “I didn’t cut and run,” she said. “Neither did Marty. Neither did production. There are still relationships there. A lot of times, growing up on a reservation, a film leaves, and you’ll go, ‘What just happened?’ The conversations need to keep happening.”

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