On 23 June 2014, it was announced that Desplat would head the jury at the 71st Venice International Film Festival. He wrote five major scores during 2014, with "The Grand Budapest Hotel" winning him his first Academy Award. His score for "The Imitation Game" was also nominated, and his win therefore marked the first time a composer had won against another of their own scores since John Williams won for "Star Wars" (beating "Close Encounters of the Third Kind") in 1978, and only the seventh time overall (Alfred Newman, Bernard Herrmann, Max Steiner, Miklos Rozsa and Johnny Green are the only other composers to achieve this).