For Work on Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Alumnus Michael Semanick Receives 11th Oscar Nomination

Michael Semanick, a 1985 graduate of Berklee’s music production and engineering major, recently received his 11th Academy Award nomination following his work on Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

January 26, 2018

Michael Semanick, a 1985 graduate of Berklee’s music production and engineering major, recently received his 11th Academy Award nomination. He is nominated for Best Sound Mixing for his re-recording work on last year’s box office smash Star Wars: The Last Jedi. He has won two Best Sound Mixing Oscars for King Kong in 2006, and for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in 2004 (in which he also appeared as a background actor for a scene with Orlando Bloom’s character, Legolas).

Since 1987, Semanick has been a rerecording mixer on more than 130 films, including some of the most popular and critically acclaimed films of the past two decades, such as The English Patient, Fight Club, Mystic River, The Lord of The Rings trilogy, The Social Network, Toy Story 3, and WALL-E. He also engineered and mixed the sound for documentaries, film shorts, video games, and the season 1 finale of Netflix’s House of Cards. Semanick has also worked as a recording engineer at Fantasy Studios in Berkeley, California, and has engineered or mixed recordings by Ray Charles, Bobby McFerrin, Todd Rundgren '17H, En Vogue, Freddy Cole, and Joe Satriani, among others.

Read more about Semanick in the fall 2008 edition of Berklee Today.