Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor + Atticus Ross Land a Pair of Emmy Award Nominations
Nine Inch Nails' Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, who've lately been cranking out their signature non-NIN scoring work, are now being recognized by the TV industry for their talent. The pair's Watchmen score just caught them two Emmy nominations among the award show's music categories.
As announced with the rest of the Television Academy's nominations on Tuesday (July 28), the Reznor and Ross Watchmen incidentals received nods in two categories: Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics and Outstanding Music Composition for a Limited Series, Movie or Special (Original Dramatic Score).
The former recognizes the duo's "The Way It Used to Be" from the Watchmen: Vol. 3 soundtrack album. It appeared in the 2019 episode "This Extraordinary Being." The latter nom is for the sum of the score as heard in the hit show's premiere episode, "It's Summer and We're Running Out of Ice."
This week, Reznor talked a bit about the duo's awards expectations — or lack thereof — when working on the music.
"We don't think a whole lot about the awards side of thing," he told Billboard. "We really immerse ourselves in the work and try to do the best we can. I think we've learned from … putting out records, it's that moment when you know it's finished and the best it can be — that's the moment you can't wait for people to hear it."
The Nine Inch Nails frontman continued, "With an album you never know what's going to happen, if it's going to be ignored or lauded, and we've taken that process with us into the scoring world."
Overall, Watchmen led this season's Emmy nominations with 11 total. It's a stunning haul for the HBO adaptation directed by Damon Lindelof and based on the original comic book series. To Billboard, Reznor's musical foil acknowledged the hard work they put in while giving most of the glory to Lindelof.
"It's simultaneously exhausting and a dream project," Ross said. "But being a fan of the graphic novel and seeing that first episode, you knew that Damon had done the graphic novel justice."
As pointed out by Consequence of Sound, the fresh nominations mean that Reznor is closing in on the coveted "EGOT" status. The acronym stands for Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony Awards. The Nine Inch Nails mastermind already has an Academy Award and multiple Grammys.
The 72nd Emmy Awards ceremony, hosted by Jimmy Kimmel on ABC, is scheduled for Sept. 20.
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