How many people have won at least 10 Oscars?
Ever since the inception of the Oscars, winning an Academy Award has been viewed as the pinnacle of the industry, and with good reason. Praise doesn’t come much higher than being recognised by your peers as being the year’s best in your chosen field, but doing it more than once is rare.
While hundreds of people have won two Oscars, it’s an infinitesimal percentage compared to the number of nominees over the last century. Winning any more than that becomes rarer still when you consider that in the entire history of the ceremony, only seven actors have at least three, and only one of them has four.
Naturally, the higher you go, the thinner the ground gets. Gary Rydstrom and Rick Baker are the only names to have claimed seven Oscars; there are three people who’ve managed to win eight, and a pair of professionals who have nine to their names. In the modern age, it’s unthinkable to imagine anybody entering double-digit territory, but it wouldn’t be a first.
Of course, most people with even a passing familiarity with the Academy Awards will know that Walt Disney has scooped more than anybody else, with the founder of the animated powerhouse that evolved into a global corporation with eyes on controlling pop culture until the end of time winning no less than 22 of the little bald buggers.
Unless something remarkable happens, that benchmark will never be matched, never mind bettered, since a lot of them saw him emerge victorious in categories that no longer exist. However, as Yoda would say, when it applies to the select group of industry figures who’ve won at least ten Oscars, there is another.
Cedric Gibbons won’t be a name familiar to modern cinemagoers, which is fair enough, seeing as he’s been dead since 1960. That said, he was his era’s pre-eminent production designer, a founding member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, assisted in the iconic design of the Oscar statue, and worked on well over 1,000 productions between 1918 and 1956.
He was nominated 39 times for ‘Best Production Design’ and won on 11 occasions, with his first coming for 1929’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey and his last for 1956’s Somebody Up There Likes Me. Apart from Disney, he’s the only other person to have ever won at least ten Oscars, and it may well stay that way forever.
Will anyone else join them?
In a word, no. Of the septet who have between seven and ten Oscars, only three of them are still alive, and they’ve been out of the reckoning for a while. Rick Baker’s last win came fairly recently, for Joe Johnston’s The Wolfman in 2011, but he retired four years later, so he won’t be back on the podium.
Alan Menken has eight, but he hasn’t won since Pocahontas‘ ‘Colors of the Wind’ took home the ‘Best Original Song’ prize in 1995, and the last time he was even shortlisted for an Academy Award came in 2010, when ‘I See the Light’ from Tangled was in the running.
The living person with the most Oscars in their trophy cabinet is Dennis Muren, who’s got eight for ‘Best Visual Effects’ to go with his ‘Technical Achievement Award’ for George Lucas’ Star Wars. He’s only one away from joining Disney and Gibbons in the exclusive club, but he’s effectively retired at this point, with any film credits in the last decade coming from his role as a creative consultant for Industrial Light & Magic.
