Billboard: The Music Of 'Roma': Get Familiar With the Oscar-Nominated Film's Soundtrack
"The songs in Alfonso Cuaron’s film, nominated for ten Academy Awards, take us to 1970s Mexico. Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón’s film Roma is nominated for ten Academy Awards, including best picture, best director, best foreign-language film, original screenplay and best lead actress (newcomer Yalitza Aparicio) as well as sound editing and sound mixing.
The movie -- Cuarón’s reconstruction of the early-1970s Mexico City of his youth -- also nabbed best foreign-language film at the Jan. 6 Golden Globe Awards, and he won best director. If Roma wins best picture at the Oscars, it will be the first time that a foreign-language film (Roma is in Spanish with some dialogue in the native Mexican Mixtec language) takes home the top Academy honor.
Music plays an exceptional role in the Netflix-produced and streamed movie, as music supervisor Lynn Fainchtein recently told Billboard. “All of the music is embedded in the story,” she said. "It’s part of each scene."
“There is nothing by accident,” she added. “Nothing that doesn’t have meaning. In Mexico, our memories are always linked to songs.”"
In addition to relying on her and Cuarón’s memories, Fainchtein did extensive research on what songs received radio airplay in 1970 and 1971. Music in Roma most often comes from the ever-present radio, an all-access medium of symbolic importance in a film that highlights class inequality.
“Music reveals a lot about a society,” Cuarón also told Billboard. “In Roma, the music shows a Mexico with pretensions of modernity, but still clinging to its past.”
Below, we break down ten songs from Roma’s soundtrack with Fainchtein's help."
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