Oscars 2020: Joker Composer Wasn’t Expecting an Academy Award Nomination

Sunday night’s Academy Awards could be a big on for Joker. The Todd Phillips-directed film was nominated for 11 awards and is the frontrunner for a few of them — including the one for Best Original Score for Hildur Guðnadóttir. Yet, while Guðnadóttir’s Joker score is the odds-on favorite to win the Oscar especially after winning the category at several other awards presentations including the Golden Globes, the fact that she was nominated at all is still a surprise for Guðnadóttir. On the red carpet for the awards, Guðnadóttir told Variety that she wasn’t expecting to be there at the Oscars.

“No, absolutely not,” Guðnadóttir said when asked if she expected to be at the Oscars back when she was working on the movie. “I was expecting, I wasn’t really sure what to expect from people’s reactions to the movie. I was expecting it to be a little bit more controversial than it ended up being, before it came out it looked like it was going to be. Yeah, I definitely wasn’t expecting to be here tonight.”

As Guðnadóttir notes, there was quite a bit of early controversy surrounding Joker. Before the film hit theaters there were those who were concerned that the film encouraged and glorified violence, including families of those killed in the Aurora, Colorado shooting during a screening of The Dark Knight Rises who wrote a letter to Warner Bros. There were even concerns that Joker might inspire actual violence at theaters, though those concerns ended up not becoming reality.

Still, when it comes to Guðnadóttir’s nomination for Best Original Score, it’s the quality of her work on Joker that stands out, not criticism of the film. It’s something that Guðnadóttir herself detailed a bit in Joker: Vision & Fury, a making-of documentary included as part of the Joker home release features.

“I started writing the music just after reading the script,” Guðnadóttir said. “So I just started playing with cello a bit, which is my main instrument, and just played around with some melodies and the feelings and I kind of sat with it for a few hours. And then I was actually practicing something else, and I kind of stumbled onto what became the main theme afterwards. It was just like a feeling strong feeling of something clicking into place, because it just connected with exactly the same feeling that I’d had when I read the script.”

Were you surprised Guðnadóttir received an Academy Award nomination for Joker’s score? Do you think she’ll win? Let us know in the comments below.