Ludwig Göransson won the Academy Award for Best Original Score for Sinners at the 98th Academy Awards on March 15, 2026, becoming, per the Associated Press winners list, the first composer to win the score category three times. The same ceremony gave Best Original Song to "Golden" from KPop Demon Hunters — the first K-pop song ever to win an Oscar.
Göransson's score for Ryan Coogler's horror period piece had already made him the category's dominant figure of the decade, after wins for Black Panther (2019) and Oppenheimer (2024). The nominated field he beat on March 15 included Alexandre Desplat for Frankenstein, Max Richter for Hamnet, and Jerskin Fendrix for Bugonia.
The win also extended one of the decade's closest director-composer partnerships. Göransson has scored Ryan Coogler's features since Fruitvale Station (2013), through Creed (2015) and Black Panther (2018); Sinners, with its blues-rooted Mississippi setting, pushed the collaboration into music the composer also performed and arranged for the screen. A third statuette in eight years puts him, by the Academy's own record, ahead of every previous name in the category's history.
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What happened with Best Original Song?
"Golden," written for the animated film KPop Demon Hunters, took the award, with co-writer Yu-Han Lee's acceptance speech cut short by the broadcast and finished in the press room afterward, as ABC and Billboard reported from the ceremony. Göransson also figured in the song category: "I Lied to You" from Sinners, written with Raphael Saadiq, was among the nominees. Sinners ended the night with four Oscars from a record sixteen nominations, while One Battle After Another took Best Picture.
For the scoring world, the results confirmed a shift the season had been signaling for months: animated and genre films, once peripheral to the music categories, now sit at the center of them.