The Best Score for 2019

A sweep that started before the season did

Guðnadóttir's score for Joker won the Golden Globe, the BAFTA, the Critics' Choice Award, and the Oscar, awarded on February 9, 2020 — a clean run through every major body, with nothing close to a contest by the time the Academy voted. A Film Scorer analysis written ahead of the ceremony called the category "a retread of this season's prior awards competitions," noting three of the five nominees — Joker, 1917, and Little Women — had already been through the Globes and BAFTA together, and Guðnadóttir had beaten that field both times already.

What made it more than a routine sweep was what had already happened in the months before Joker even entered the conversation. Guðnadóttir's score for HBO's Chernobyl had won her an Emmy that September and a Grammy the following January — two wins, for two different genres of work, arriving less than five months before her Oscar. Deadline counted the full run: Emmy, Grammy, Golden Globe, BAFTA, Oscar, five trophies in under 140 days, for two entirely separate scores.

The first, in a category with very few

Guðnadóttir became the first solo woman to win Best Original Score, and by most counts the fourth woman total, following Anne Dudley's win for The Full Monty in 1998 and Rachel Portman's for Emma the year before that — meaning 23 years had passed since a woman had last won the category outright. She was also only the eighth female composer ever nominated in it. Accepting the award from presenters Gal Gadot, Brie Larson, and Sigourney Weaver, she used the moment directly: "To the girls, to the women, to the mothers, to the daughters, who hear the music bubbling within, please speak up. We need to hear your voices."

She's also the first Icelandic composer to win the category. Jóhann Jóhannsson, the composer who mentored her and helped build her path from Iceland's experimental music scene into film scoring — his own nominated scores for The Theory of Everything and Sicario came in 2015 and 2016 — had died two years before her win.

A cello player from a family built for this

Guðnadóttir grew up the daughter of a clarinetist and an opera singer, and came to film music by way of a genuinely unusual résumé for the category: session work and collaborations with The Knife, Throbbing Gristle, and Sunn O))) — acts about as far from a traditional Hollywood scoring career as the genre gets. Sicario and Arrival, both scored by Jóhannsson, featured her as a performing cellist before she was writing scores of her own.

For Joker, her approach leaned into that avant-garde instinct rather than away from it. Rather than write to the finished picture, she began composing before much of the film was shot, working from the script alone, and built the score around repeated, droning cello motifs — an oppressive, unresolving atmosphere rather than a conventional theme. Joaquin Phoenix later said the score shaped his performance directly, that he used her music, played on set, to find Arthur Fleck's physicality before he'd fully worked out who the character was.

A sweep that was really two sweeps

Most of the sweeps covered here — Dune, Soul, Sinners — are a single score winning every vote in a single season. Guðnadóttir's run is the outlier: two different, unrelated projects, in two different disciplines, each sweeping its own set of awards, back to back, inside less than half a year. The Oscar wasn't the culmination of one campaign. It was the second half of a run that had already proven itself once, for a five-part miniseries about a nuclear disaster, before Joker ever reached a ballot.