The Oscar nominees for 2025 were announced Thursday morning. The list for Best Original Score caused a minor stir in Defector's Slack when it was observed that the score of Challengers, by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, didn't make the cut. Reznor and Ross have been nominated before, lots of times, for lots of different awards. They've won a couple Oscars already, a BAFTA, an Emmy, three Golden Globes, and probably some Grammys. The score for Challengers was well-received and memorable, and was an important part of a well-reviewed film. And like most Reznor and Ross joints, it's something a normal person might choose to bump on their car's sound system, in those moments where they feel like driving very fast. Certainly I will not be jamming out to the score of The Wild Robot, a movie I had never heard of before this morning.
Unfortunately, I am forced to rush to the defense of the Academy in this case. However jaunty and fun the rest of the Challengers score may be, the Academy was right to penalize Reznor and Ross for having created the song "Yeah x10," which is the most irritating piece of music imaginable.
In this part of the movie, the two main guys—I don't remember anything about them except that they have floppy hair and infuriating faces—get boners together while watching Tashi Duncan do backhands at a more physically rectangular opponent. You are meant to be as distracted as they are by the physical beauty of Zendaya. Also there are a lot of satisfying tennis sounds. It was possible, while watching this scene in the movie theater, to miss just how incredibly fucking brain-shreddingly annoying this song is. And so you go home and download the score and add it to your various playlists, thinking that it will be a fun thing to listen to, in the background, around the house.
Then one afternoon, you are trying to concentrate on putting the finishing touches on a blog in order to redeem the hours of the day you spent noodling around on Basketball Reference, and you find suddenly that you cannot concentrate, and also that you are in the worst mood of your life. Then you notice that the most annoying voice in the universe is repeating "yeah yeah yeah yeah-yeah-yeah yeah yeah-yeah-yeah" in your ears over and over again, in exactly the style that your asshole of a sibling might say "I'm not touching you" while hoping to provoke you into a meltdown. As soon as you do not have a beautiful person's minimally obscured buttcheeks to draw your attention away from this song, you are forced to confront the fact that this song is also on the soundtrack to hell.
And then it gets stuck in your head for a week! By Day 2 of this your nerves are simply gone. There you are, unkempt, dead-eyed, shambling through the grocery store in the hollowed-out manner of one who no longer particularly hopes to survive the day, and suddenly, out of your own mouth: "Yeah yeah yeah yeah-yeah-yeah yeah yeah-yeah-yeah."
Here are some deeply sick people who I work with:
Kelsey: i love that song chris
Luis: Oh I love it and sing along with it
Sabrina: yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah!!!
Kelsey: i have gotten a lot of work done this year
to this soundtrack
Sabrina: boop beep beep beep boop beep
Luis: I snuck that song onto my housewarming party playlist lol
Justin: Chris thank you for reminding me to play the challengers soundtrack today to get locked in
To these people, I say: No no no no-no-no no no-no-no! And to the Academy, for denying this score an accolade it might otherwise deserve, I say, in a voice that is mature and dignified but which rings with admiration: Yeah yeah yeah yeah-yeah-yeah yeah yeah-yeah-yeah.
