The fabled EGOT — when a single performer wins an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony over the course of their career — has only been achieved by 16 people in history, provided honorary awards are excluded. The most recent people to complete the feat are John Legend and Alan Menken.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, best known as the creator of Hamilton, is three-quarters of the way there, with only an Oscar remaining. He has an Emmy, Grammy, and many Tonys, in addition to a People’s Choice Award, Obie and Drama Desk Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, and a MacArthur fellowship. Indeed, the Wikipedia entry titled “List of awards and nominations received by Lin-Manuel Miranda” is very long.
It’s not clear exactly how much Miranda values the EGOT, but he has certainly been spending a lot of time working on movies.
He has an Emmy, Grammy, and many Tonys, in addition to a People’s Choice Award, Obie and Drama Desk Awards, the Pulitzer Prize, and a MacArthur fellowship
Miranda was nominated for one Oscar, for writing the song “How Far I’ll Go” from Moana, although he didn’t win; he had already completed the other three legs of the EGOT at that time.
The Disney+ version of Hamilton was deemed not eligible for the Oscars last year, but Miranda has no less than four movies that have come out in 2021, and he wrote entire suites of songs for three of them.
There was the movie adaptation of his first Broadway musical, In the Heights, as well as a pair of animated musicals: Netflix’s Vivo and Disney’s Encanto, for which he wrote entire scores. Miranda is also the director of Tick… Tick… Boom, the musical that recently debuted on Netflix, although Miranda did not write songs for that.
Potential Winners
So, what could provide Miranda his Oscar this year? Warner Brothers’ For Your Consideration website lists Miranda, for In the Heights, for Best Picture (as producer), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score, and Best Original Song for “Home All Summer.” While most of the musical numbers in In the Heights date back to the stage show and therefore aren’t original, that one is new.
Vivo is listed on Netflix’s For Your Consideration site, pushing it in the Animated Feature category, although it doesn’t mention specific songs. Also, Miranda could conceivably be nominated for Best Director for Tick… Tick… Boom, but that’s probably a long shot.
The Best Original Song is probably his best bet, and that song is likely “Dos Oruguitas” from Encanto. That’s the type of song, from a Disney animated film, that tends to get nominated for the Best Original Song Oscar.
Even if he doesn’t win this year, Miranda is currently working on music for the live-action Little Mermaid movie, along with EGOT winner Alan Menken, who has two Oscars for the score and song (“Under the Sea”) from the original animated Little Mermaid, along with the late Howard Ashman.
