On October 10, the 26th World Soundtrack Awards (WSA) Ceremony & Concert took place in Ghent, Belgium, as part of Film Fest Gent. It is one of the few awards devoted entirely to film and screen music. Last week we covered Mari Fukuhara's nomination for Discovery of the Year for Little Amélie or the Character of Rain, so here is a look at this year's winners, including how that category turned out.

Film Composer of the Year: Daniel Pemberton, for Four Very Different Films

The headline Film Composer of the Year award went to Daniel Pemberton for Project Hail Mary, The Drama, The Bad Guys 2 and Masters of the Universe. His fellow nominees were Alexandre Desplat, Jonny Greenwood, Hildur Guðnadóttir and Max Richter, a list of names that has dominated recent awards seasons. Pemberton winning against that field says a lot.

This category rewards a composer's whole year rather than a single score. A sci-fi drama about a scientist stranded in space, an animated heist comedy and a live-action take on a classic toy-line hero are about as different in genre and temperature as four films can be. Writing all of them in one year is Pemberton's real strength. This is the composer who stitched hip-hop and orchestra together in Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, so it feels like a year that rewarded being able to score anything.

Project Hail Mary was also nominated for the fan-voted Public Choice Award, but that prize went to Kevin Smithers for the Mexican stop-motion feature Soy Frankelda. It beat big titles such as Avatar: Fire and Ash and KPop Demon Hunters, which shows how much passion its fans brought to the vote.

Discovery of the Year: Hannah Peel, as Mari Fukuhara Narrowly Misses Out

Discovery of the Year, the award for new talent, went to Northern Irish composer Hannah Peel for Midwinter Break. The other nominees were Mari Fukuhara (Little Amélie or the Character of Rain), Paris Hurley (The Chronology of Water), Kangding Ray (Sirat) and Sam Slater (2000 Meters to Andriivka).

Midwinter Break is a British drama starring Lesley Manville and Ciarán Hinds as a long-married couple. It is the feature film debut of theater director Polly Findlay. According to an article from its distributor, Focus Features, the score is built on a "conversation" between Peel's own piano and Alice Allen's cello, with a string quintet, harp, clarinet and soprano around them. Because the film leans heavily on silence, the two paid close attention to where each cue came in and where it dropped out. This may be an award won less through spectacle than through the courage to leave space.

Fukuhara did not win, but a Japanese composer reaching the final five of this category for an animated feature made abroad is significant in itself. We hope it sends more listeners to the music of Little Amélie.

Other Winners: Trevor Jones Honored for Lifetime Achievement, "Golden" Wins Best Song

  • Television Composer of the Year: Jeff Russo (Alien: Earth, Cape Fear, Citadel Season 2)
  • Lifetime Achievement Award: Trevor Jones
  • Game Music Award: Nicolas Garcia (Cthulhu: The Cosmic Abyss)
  • Best Original Song: "Golden" (KPop Demon Hunters)
  • Best Original Composition by a Young Composer: Xabier Doural García
  • Best Original Score for a Belgian Production: Margaret Hermant (A la cara, Mallorca Confidencial)

Lifetime Achievement honoree Trevor Jones is known for The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth and The Last of the Mohicans (co-composed with Randy Edelman). For a generation raised on Jim Henson's fantasy films, his music is the sound of those strange forests. The Game Music nominees also included Crimson Desert, Dispatch, Marathon and UNBEATABLE, and game music holding its own among a film festival's awards feels very much of this year.

Then there is "Golden": a song from an animated film took the top original song prize. The winners list itself shows how much the gap between screen music and animation keeps narrowing. Here's hoping a Japanese name appears in Ghent again next year.