Oscars 2015: Alexandre Desplat wins for original score with ‘Budapest’

Alexandre Desplat, the prolific French composer whose competition included himself, won the Academy Award for original score Sunday evening at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood.

He took the Oscar with his music for “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” one of two movies (along with “The Imitation Game”) for which he’d been nominated in the category this year.

FULL COVERAGE: Oscars 2015

“Getting a nomination is such a surprise, an anomaly,” Desplat recently told The Times. “Getting two, it’s almost embarrassing!”

Of his work on “Budapest,” a quirky comedy about a hotel concierge played by Ralph Fiennes, Desplat said the film’s director, Wes Anderson, “came with this idea that we should use instruments from this vague, vast area [of Eastern Europe]. So we started putting a little band together with balalaikas, cimbaloms, zithers, and it became a very special sound that only belongs, I think, to ‘The Grand Budapest Hotel.’”

This month Desplat won a Grammy Award for score soundtrack for visual media.

In addition to his own work on “The Imitation Game,” Desplat’s “Budapest” score defeated Hans Zimmer’s for “Interstellar,” Gary Yershon’s for “Mr. Turner” and Jóhann Jóhannsson’s for “The Theory of Everything.”

Last year, Steven Price won the original score prize for his work on “Gravity”; other recent recipients include Mychael Danna (for “Life of Pi”) and Ludovic Bource (for “The Artist”).