Report from the The Third Annual Lloyd Awards

stumble, stumble, trip. stumble, stumble, trip. I was flowing around seeking info about the Precious soundtrack. I was a little disappointed with the movie itself but enjoyed one segment I would call 'Soul Holiday'. Wanted to see if I could Itunes the track. I can but it's not the cut from the movie. Anyway, in my stumbling I came across a blog called Boombox Serenade. It's a film-music blog. i guess they also present the lloyd dobbler award for 'the most outstanding film-music moments of the year'.

Sure enough, no less than two moments I loved from the past year earned 'Lloydie's'

Lloyd #5 goes to Directors Spike Jonze and Arcade Fire for the "Wake Up" trailer for Where The Wild Things Are. The first-ever trailer to win a prestigious (*cough*) Lloyd Award, this movie preview made everyone who saw it sit up and take notice—all without any voice-over or snippets of dialogue. Arcade Fire's "Wake Up" set a sweeping, even epic tone for Spike Jonze's unsanitized interpretation of the children's book by Maurice Sendak—revealing the downcast palette of browns and grays that scandalized studio executives when they first saw it. More like a music video than a trailer, this piece stands on its own and is full of the big, unruly emotions that define the film. It lets you know that if you watch this movie, you'll be reliving the glory and the terror of that time in your childhood when you realized home could no longer fully contain you, and that you'd have to venture out into the wider, much wilder world.

and

Lloyd #2 goes to Director Lee Daniels, Music Supervisor Lynn Fainchtein, and Sounds of Blackness for the "Soul Holiday" sequence in Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire. This sequence is so carefully and artfully crafted that it transcends our usual definition of "film-music moment" and becomes an actual storytelling element in and of itself—woven into the very fabric of the film through careful interlacing of action and sound. We are talking, of course, about the climactic scene in which Precious' abusive mom pushes Precious down a flight of stairs while she is cradling her newborn son. Sometime during this bone chilling series of events, the early strains of a gospel song called "Soul Holiday" are folded into the action. "Time to celebrate," it begins, "our love for one another," a bitterly ironic choice at this moment, but as she ventures blindly out into the night—operating on pure instinct to protect her child—Precious sees a choir practicing in a church and has a brief fantasy of singing with them. As "Soul Holiday" grows louder over top the scene, we realize this is our protagonist's pivotal moment and the song is the anthem of her Herculean feat: walking out on the monster who was ruining her life. The fact that it's a Christmas song implies bravery on par with the biblical Mary and the "holiday" reference may also refer to a coping strategy common to victims of abuse: an ability to flee their own bodies for brief periods of time. It is a brilliant, deeply layered sequence—one so perfect that it's hard to imagine it any other way, and especially with any other music.