From time to time - but certainly recently - I've found that being a fan is dangerous, because what you love (or, in this case, the people who love it with you) will disappoint you. At a film music message board, there was a topic about scores that didn't deserve Oscar wins. I swung the topic around to 1997's Best Musical or Comedy Score category...where someone had the grapes to say that none of the nominated scores deserved to win...and this included Zimmer's As Good as it Gets, Elfman's Men in Black and David Newman's Anastasia. Also, at the IMDb's composer board, I mentioned Patrick Doyle's Igor as a good recent score that no one's talking about. The two respondees were unimpressed by Doyle's oevure...and these same two people talked up a modern masterpiece of film composition...The Dark Knight. (Note to self: defending Patrick Doyle to fans of The Dark Knight's score is like pissing in the wind - pointless and messy.)

Still, not all film music lovers these days are on crack. A local critic mentioned, in his opinion, the ten greatest film scores he's ever heard:

Anatomy of a Murder (Duke Ellington)
Ben-Hur (Miklos Rozsa)
Fargo (Carter Burwell)
Hoffa (David Newman)
The Last of the Mohicans (Trevor Jones)
The Man With the Golden Arm (Elmer Bernstein)
Once Upon a Time in America (Ennio Morricone)
Paris, Texas (Ry Cooder)
Rebel Without a Cause (Leonard Rosenman)
Vertigo (Bernard Herrmann)

Quite a diverse list (with the inspiration for my taking notice of his list in bold) and proof that all is not lost in film music fandom. There are still people who care.

Incidentally, I'm listening to Marc Shaiman's Addams Family Values as I type this (It's Shaiman's birthday today, but I already did write a little something about it). Not an all-time favorite, but a really fun score. It's pretty nice to pull stuff from the collection and listen. You might end up loving something all over again.