Oscars 2026: Ludwig Göransson makes history with ‘Best Original Score’ win for ‘Sinners’
Ludwig Göransson has won his third Academy Award for ‘Best Original Score’, and his second for a Ryan Coogler movie, after Sinners was awarded the prize. Not only that, but at the age of 41, he’s become the youngest three-time Oscar winner in history.
The composer has quickly established himself as one of the best in the business, and in splitting his time between frequent collaborator Coogler and Christopher Nolan, his soundscapes have come attached to some of the biggest movies in recent years.
For a film as deeply rooted in music as Sinners, it was always going to require a score to match. As far as Coogler was concerned, there was nobody better suited for the job than his long-time friend and the composer of his entire filmography, and Göransson has once again repaid that faith in kind.
It’s his third win and fifth nomination overall, having also been shortlisted in the ‘Best Original Song’ category for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever‘s ‘Lift Me Up’ and Sinners‘ ‘I Lied to You’, and from the second the blockbuster horror was released in March 2025, the winner was never in doubt.
Even though One Battle After Another‘s Jonny Greenwood, Frankenstein‘s Alexandre Desplat, Hamnet‘s Max Richter, and Bugonia‘s Jerskin Fendrix all did incredible work in their own right, ‘Best Original Score’ was always Ludwig Göransson’s to lose, even if nobody thought for a second that he would.
Having gone back-to-back now that his previous two scores, Oppenheimer and Sinners, are both Oscar winners, he’s tripled his Oscar count in quick succession, and it can’t be ruled out that he’ll be celebrating a hattrick this time next year, either.
While common sense indicates that he’s not going to win for Jon Favreau’s The Mandalorian and Grogu, although that’s not to suggest that he can’t channel the spirit of John Williams’ finest work from the Star Wars franchise, Göransson does have Nolan’s epic, The Odyssey, releasing in the summer.
Sinners accomplished the rare feat of being not only an awards season darling, but a commercial smash hit and a cultural phenomenon, made all the more impressive by the fact that, at its core, it’s a horror movie, a genre that hasn’t regularly received too much attention from the Academy.
That said, the combination of Coogler’s vision, Göransson’s music, and the performances of the ensemble cast elevated it to greatness, and it’s another trophy in the bag for the most-nominated movie in Oscars history.
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