The International Film Music Critics Association announces its winners!

Behold:

Film Score of the Year
“The Ghost Writer” (AlexandreDesplat)
“How to Train Your Dragon” (John Powell)
“Inception” (Hans Zimmer)
“The King’s Speech” (Alexandre Desplat)
“TRON Legacy” (Daft Punk)

Film Composer of the Year
Alexandre Desplat
Danny Elfman
James Newton Howard
John Powell
Hans Zimmer

Breakout Composer of the Year
Óscar Araujo
Arnau Bataller
Daft Punk
Herbert Grönemeyer
Nuno Malo

Does the old guard face an end to their reign in the Oscar musical categories?

Via Variety:

This season's Oscar-nominated scores reflect the new realities about music in film: While there will always be room for the traditional symphonic score, composers and filmmakers are now so comfortable with high-tech recording techniques, world music and electronic soundscapes that the playing field is broader than ever before.

Twenty years ago, it would have been difficult to imagine that an American-born industrial-rock pioneer and his British partner would be nominated alongside a German-born pop producer-turned-composer, an Indian-music superstar, a French flutist-turned-composer and a conservatory-trained British tunesmith.

For a contemporary sound in "The Social Network," director David Fincher turned to Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, who had never scored a film before (although his English-born partner, Atticus Ross, had done "The Book of Eli").

Their work -- a moody mixture of old modular-synth sounds and electronic processing of real acoustic instruments, including a recurring piano figure -- reflects a little of Fincher's ideas (he had referenced the sounds once made by Wendy Carlos and Tangerine Dream) and a lot of the kinds of ambient soundscapes that Reznor and Ross had previously imagined on their "Ghosts I-IV" album in 2008.