Walt Disney Still Holds These 5 Oscar Records, Nearly 60 Years After His Death
Written by djfrosty on May 25, 2023
At the Oscars in February 1954 (see photo accompanying this list), Disney won four Oscars – best documentary feature (The Living Desert), best documentary short subject (The Alaskan Eskimo), best cartoon short subject (Toot, Whistle, Plunk and Boom) and best two-reel short subject (Bear Country). No one else had ever won more than two awards in one night.
On accepting his fourth award of the night, for Bear Country, Disney joked, “I’ve just gotta say one more word. It’s wonderful — but I think this is my year to retire.”
Happily, he did not retire. In the remaining 12+ years of his life, he opened Disneyland, launched an Emmy-winning TV series (initially called Walt Disney’s Disneyland) and co-produced the beloved film musical Mary Poppins.
Runners-up, with three Oscars in one night, are (listed chronologically): Billy Wilder (The Apartment, 1961), Marvin Hamlisch (The Way We Were, The Sting, 1974), Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather, Part II, 1975), James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment, 1984), James Cameron (Titanic, 1998), Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, 2004), Ethan Cohen and Joel Coen (No Country for Old Men, 2008), Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) 2015), Bong Joon-Ho (Parasite, 2020) and Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (Everything Everywhere All at Once (2023).