Has anyone ever won a Grammy and an Oscar in the same year?
As this year’s awards season builds to its grand finale—the Oscars—it’s the perfect time to reminisce about the standout gongs of years past. One of the most game-changing moments came in 1934, when the Academy first introduced the ‘Best Original Song’ category, merging the worlds of film and music with epic force. It also gave rise to a new class of stars—those who could master both realms with effortless ease.
Naturally, if you’re able to pen an Oscar-worthy tune, in most cases, the Grammys are also bound to come calling your name. For the vast majority of artists, if you can scoop these two accolades at any point in the course of your career, it’s pretty legendary. However, even then, there’s another tier that managed to take things up a notch – by scoring a double-whammy in the same year.
It probably goes without saying that this is a fairly rare feat, but there is a small collection of lucky artists who beat the odds. By the nature of the Oscars’ musical category, most of the winners are soundtrack composers, but nonetheless, their illustrious achievements secure them a place in the history books, for which they will always be remembered.
The first titan to sweep up on this front was an actor turned singer-songwriter Paul Jabara, whose prolific partnership with Donna Summer led him to double victory with the song ‘Last Dance’, which he wrote for the 1978 musical comedy Thank God It’s Friday. Not only did it pick up ‘Best Original Score’ at the Oscars, but it also took home ‘Best Female R&B Vocal Performance’ at that year’s Grammys, setting Jabara as the inaugural custodian of a new league. Jumping to the most recent admission, in 2019, Lady Gaga also coveted multiple Grammys and a prized Oscar for her turn in A Star is Born, opening up the enviable feat to a new generation.
Over in the Disney camp, there are two more double winners who vie for the throne. It first began in 1989 when Howard Ashman and Alan Menken won the Oscar and the Grammy for ‘Under the Sea’ from The Little Mermaid, before being trumped six years later by the Saharan overlords of The Lion King, for which it’s fair to say Hans Zimmer cleaned up the awards with multiple wins on both fronts. With ‘Best Original Score’ and ‘Song’ from the Oscars as well as ‘Best Musical Album for Children’ from the Grammys, but to name a few, Zimmer had the green-eyed monsters of the world shooting him daggers for his all-out acclaim.
However, perhaps the most relevant when it comes to the rock canon is one Carly Simon, who stands as the double-sword winner for the song ‘Let the River Run’ from the 1988 classic rom-com Working Girl starring Harrison Ford and Sigourney Weaver. For the part of the Grammy that year, it joined another win alongside 14 seismic nominations along the length of her career, cementing Simon as a true giant of both worlds that leaves many others quaking in her wake.
Of course, there is a legion of mega-stars who have nabbed the Oscar and the Grammy at different stages in their careers – Billie Eilish and Elton John, to name a few. But this doesn’t take away from the small but mighty group who managed to straddle both waves at the same time, demonstrating all at once the extent of their unstoppable force.
