What was the only Oscar won by Mel Brooks?
Showbusiness legends don’t get much bigger than Mel Brooks. As the mastermind behind iconic spoofs like Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, Brooks’ unique comedic sensibility is as influential as it is immediately identifiable. With eight decades of experience in entertainment, Brooks remains one of the last connections between the old-school studio system of classic Hollywood and the more modern version of the business.
Across his nearly 80-year career, Brooks has never stopped working, transitioning into theatre and television in more recent years. This year sees the 94-year-old writing and producing a new television miniseries that acts as a sequel to his 1981 film History of the World, Part 1. Part of the gag of the original film is that there was no Part 2 ever planned, but now, History of the World, Part 2 does indeed exist and features a host of comedic actors paying tribute to Brooks’ singular style of comedy.
Based on his unmatched status as a comedic behemoth, it wouldn’t be a terribly big surprise if Brooks didn’t have an Academy Award to his name. The Oscars have historically been loath to celebrate comedies, especially in the modern age. While the original ceremony actually had separate categories for directing dramas and comedies, the Oscars have now put every genre on a level playing field, inadvertently favouring dramas over more niche categories like action, adventure, and especially comedy.
But Brooks does have an Oscar. In fact, he has an EGOT: an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar, and a Tony Award. Brooks nabbed his first of four Emmy Awards in 1967 for writing The Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner, Howard Morris Special. Brooks won a Grammy for ‘Best Comedy Album’, along with Carl Reiner, in 1997 for The 2000 Year Old Man in the Year 2000. The 2001 stage adaptation of The Producers gave Brooks three Tony Awards in 2001, including one for ‘Best Musical’.
But what film did Brooks win an Oscar for? Brooks had a brief stint producing drama films like The Elephant Man and Frances, going uncredited so that audiences didn’t think that the movies were comedies. If either of those had won ‘Best Picture’, Brooks would have been awarded an Oscar. But neither did, and despite gaining nominations in ‘Best Adapted Screenplay’ for Young Frankenstein and ‘Best Original Song’ for the title song of Blazing Saddles, neither of those films won their respective awards either.
Instead, Brooks’ first and so-far only Oscar came all the way back in 1969 for the first film he ever directed. The Producers was a controversial film when it came out at the end of the 1960s, with Brooks’ sharp-pointed satire on both the theatre industry and Naziism causing the film to receive mixed reviews. Gene Wilder managed to snag a nomination for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, but it was Brooks himself who emerged victorious with an award for ‘Best Original Screenplay’.
