The Academy has been handing out gold statues for Best Original Score since 1934, and on Sunday night, they awarded another. In those 86 years, a woman has won four times.

The ceremony had faced criticism once again this year for its lack of diversity among nominees, reigniting the #OscarsSoWhite hashtag that first appeared in 2015. In many of the non-gendered categories, women have long been excluded. With one exception, the nominees for Best Original Score upheld that status quo, honoring well-known, well-loved and well-awarded (together the nominees have garnered a total of 99 nominations) composers.

Having already taken home the BAFTA, Critic’s Choice and Golden Globe awards, Icelandic composer and first-time-Oscar-nominee Hildur Guðnadóttir was favored to win the category, and her score for Joker beat out work from host of veteran composers. Her nomination makes her the seventh woman to be recognized in the category. She’s only the fourth to win.

Also nominated this year was John Williams’s final turn with the Star Wars franchise,The Rise of Skywalker, dueling cousins Thomas Newman and Randy Newman for 1917 and Marriage Story, respectively, and Alexandre Desplat’s score for Little Women. 

Here’s a look at Guðnadóttir’s score, as well as few of the female composers that paved the Oscar way:

Joker, Hildur Guðnadóttir (2019)

A cellist since age 5, Guðnadóttir wanted to create a soundscape for Joker‘s title character that not only reflected his dark, tortured psyche, but also his humanity. “I sat down with the cello to kind of just find my way into his voice and into his head,” she told NPR last October. “And I’m just like kind of holding onto this feeling that I had after reading the script. As soon as I played those first notes, it really hit me in the chest somehow, and it was a really strong, physical reaction that I got. And I was like, yes, this is it.” The theme is performed on halldorophone, an electro-acoustic cello instrument that Guðnadóttir helped develop.

The Full Monty, Anne Dudley (1997)

Dudley, who first came to prominence as a member of the English synth-pop band Art of Noise, penned a quirky music that provided the perfect underscore for The Full Monty. The film follows  six unemployed steel workers putting together a male striptease act to make ends meet. Dudley recently spoke out about the continued barriers that female film composers face.

Emma, Rachel Porter (1996)

Having also written the music for nominees The Cider House Rules (1999) and Chocolat (2000), Portman has the most nominations as a female composer with three nods, although she has composed over 100 scores for film, television and theater. It was her music for Emma that earned her a statuette, making her the first female composer to win the category.

Yentl, Marilyn Bergman (1983)

While Bergman is officially the first woman nominated in the Best Original Score category, she picked up the award in 1983 not as a composer, but as a lyricist for the musical drama Yentl starring Barbara Streisand. As part of a songwriting duo with her husband Alan, Bergman has also won Oscars for Best Original Song with “The Windmills of Your Mind” and another Streisand hit: “The Way We Were.”

 

Click here for NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour 2020 Oscar predictions.