Italy picked up two Oscars here on Sunday night with legendary film composer Ennio Morricone receiving his first ever statuette in the form of a lifetime achievement award and Milena Canonero winning her third Oscar for costume design.
The 78-year-old maestro, whose signature soundtracks for Sergio Leone's 1960s spaghetti Westerns brought him instant fame, was presented the award by Clint Eastwood, who was placed on the path to stardom by the same Leone movies.
An overcome Morricone dedicated the prized statuette to his wife Maria, saying "this Oscar is for you Maria. Thank you for everything. She loves me enormously and I love her".
The composer, who has been nominated for an Oscar five times in his long career but without ever winning, was given a standing ovation.
Morricone went on to pay tribute to "all the artists who have deserved this prize but have never received it".
"This Oscar is not a point of arrival for me but a starting point for improving my work for the cinema and my personal style in applied music," he said, speaking in Italian with Eastwood translating.
"A composer never retires - he dies with the pen in his hand," he added.
On learning last December that he was to receive the Oscar, Morricone commented that the decision had "corrected an oversight".
"I've been given a host of awards - the only one missing was the Oscar," he said.
He has frequently expressed disappointment at the Academy's omission, particularly after it overlooked his poignant score for Roland Joffe's epic tale of 18th-century genocide in South America, The Mission.
"That score really deserved the Oscar and everybody thought it would get it... The music to that film really represents everything I am - both on a technical and spiritual level," Morricone once told the BBC.
Instead, the 1986 music Oscar went to Round Midnight, a film about a self-destructive jazz artist.
Morricone said afterwards that it had been a "theft", especially since the Round Midnight score was mainly based on existing pieces.
The maestro has scored more than 500 movies and TV films in a career spanning 45 years.
Other Oscar nominations were for his music to the Richard Gere-starring drama Days Of Heaven (1978), the Brian de Palma Mafia movie The Untouchables (1987), the gangster movie Bugsy (1991) with Warren Beatty, and Italian director Giuseppe Tornatore's 2000 film Malena featuring Monica Bellucci.
But in most people's minds, Morricone's name is inevitably twinned with that of Sergio Leone, all of whose films were scored by the Rome-born composer.
Although they both attended the same junior school, they only began working together in 1964 when Morricone wrote the music for A Fistful Of Dollars, the first film in the hit Eastwood-starring trilogy.
The famous trumpet solo, the use of twangy guitars and the whistling light motif associated with Eastwood became an integral part of the film's success.
In the follow-up For A Few Dollars More, a haunting tune played on the chimes of a pocket-watch provided the main theme, while in the final The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966), Morricone added a trademark coyote-howl motif to his score, created by two yelling male voices.
The trilogy's soundtracks became the most recognised sounds ever affiliated with the Western genre.
The composer created another memorable soundtrack for Leone's gangster epic Once Upon A Time in America (1984) with Robert De Niro.
Other credits include Bernardo Bertolucci's Novecento (1900), Tornatore's Cinema Paradiso, Roman Polanski's Frantic and Franco Zeffirelli's Hamlet.
Morricone has remained rooted in Rome, where he was born in 1928, and has turned down repeated offers to transfer to Hollywood.
"I was offered a free villa in Beverly Hills but I said no thank you, I prefer to live in Italy," the composer, who does not speak English, told reporters recently.
Italian politicians including Premier Romano Prodi congratulated Morricone on his Oscar.
Prodi said that "while Hollywood toasts you, the whole of Italy thanks you for having taken our country to such high levels of art and poetry. The emotions and feelings that you manage to communicate extend beyond the notes".
Meanwhile, Canonero clinched her third Oscar for her costumes in Sophia Coppola's lavish period film Marie Antoniette.
Canonero won her first Oscar in 1976 for her costumes in Stanley Kubrick's Barry Lyndon and her second in 1982 for her work on Hugh Hudson's Chariots of Fire, which also bagged the Oscar for best film.
In her acceptance speech on Sunday night, the Turin-born costume designer thanked both Kubrick and Hudson, as well as her mother, saying she would not be where she was without them.
Canonero made her cinema debut with Kubrick in his 1971 A Clockwork Orange, in which she rejected the space-age costumes in Anthony Burgess' source novel in favour of a British middle-class look complete with bowler hats and walking sticks.
She returned to work with Kubrick on Barry Lyndon and for a third time on his 1980 thriller The Shining starring Jack Nicholson.
Canonero has received five other Oscar nominations for her work on the films Out of Africa (1986), Tucker, the Man and His Dream (1989), Dick Tracy (1991), Titus (2000) and The Affair of the Necklace (2002).
