Surprisingly, this year’s Academy Awards race sees the Score category as among the most competitive.

That’s because before the various branches actually nominate their 5 choices – with the music branch members voting on Score and Song, with actors nominating in the 4 acting categories – the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Science winnows down the possibilities in every category with a shortlist.

This year there are 20 Scores in that shortlist. Makeup and Hairstyling, for example, only have 10 eligible. Song has 15.

Ever since Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s game-changing electronica score for “The Social Network” won, Score has become an increasingly visible category.

Among the high-profile films battling for Oscar attention, Mississippi blues music highlights Ludwig Goransson’s “Sinners” score, Nine Inch Nails was inspired by the two previous electronic music entries for this third “Tron: Ares,” and Jerskin Fendrix’s 90-piece orchestra was inspired by three key words in “Bugonia”: Bees, basement, spaceship.

But no entry has quite generated the buzz or admiration like Óliver Laxe’s “Sirāt” which won the Jury Prize at Cannes, is Spain’s entry for Oscar’s Best International Feature and whose electronic score by the French, Berlin-based Kangding Ray (aka David Letellier) has been nominated for the Critics Choice and Golden Globe awards.

It has also been shortlisted for its cinematography and casting.

“Sirāt” is about a father with his young son searching for his daughter who has disappeared. She was last seen at a desert rave. So this distraught father follows raves hoping she will appear. His journey – Laxe filmed in Morocco and Spain – is exotic and mind-bending as if we have dropped into another world, in a different dimension.

“To be honest Oliver Laxe is very well regarded but when we started working on this film, we had no idea where it would go,” Kangding, 47, said in a virtual interview from Berlin. “We rolled the dice on a journey we didn’t know but where I gave it my best.

“Now we’re seeing that it resonates with so many people. In France for example, it was even a big box-office success.”

The music is continually unexpected, surprising.

“I wanted strong emotions but also something very raw and not necessarily something pretty. We worked a lot on the texture. For me the inspiration was the desert, the light.

“But also the texture of the rocks and the sand. Those sounds needed to reflect the rawness, the unforgiving nature of the desert. This landscape puts you back in your place as a human.

“I work on sounds in a very open way. I don’t have preconceived ideas. That’s why I like electronic sounds, they’re open for interpretation. If you compose for a specific instrument you know the way you’re going.

“For me with electronics I wanted ‘Sirāt’ to have a continuity but also a contrast.”

Oscar nominations are announced Jan. 22.