Well-known names who won these less celebrated Oscars

Though widely regarded as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, Stanley Kubrick won only one Academy Award personally, and it wasn’t for directing. His science-fiction masterpiece, “2001: A Space Odyssey,” blew moviegoers’ minds in 1968 with its groundbreaking visual effects, giving him an easy Oscar win over the guys who made “Ice Station Zebra” look really cold (even if the losing film was one of Howard Hughes' favorites ).

Burt Bacharach won two Oscars in 1970 for “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” — one for Best Original Song (“Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head”) and another for Best Original Score. It was an unusual win for a variety of reasons: No Western had ever had music quite like that, and the Academy favored more traditionally orchestrated musical scores. (He beat out old favorite Ernest Gold and soon-to-be-old-favorite John Williams.) The times, they were a-changin’.

The Academy ignored The Beatles at the height of Beatlemania in the 1960s (no nominations for “A Hard Day’s Night,” “Help!” or “Yellow Submarine”), but it finally came through after the band had broken up with a Best Original Song Score Oscar for the difficult-to-watch documentary “Let It Be” — a bitter irony as the album the Beatles are recording is considered by fans and critics alike to be the band’s worst — or, more accurately, least great — LP.

“The Dean of American Composers” was best known for his populist classical compositions like “Fanfare for the Common Man,” “Billy the Kid” and “Appalachian Spring.” But when Hollywood came calling, he answered with a string of modest yet indelible scores for dramas like “Of Mice and Men” and “The Heiress,” for which he won an Oscar (though in light of his opening credits theme being scrapped by director William Wyler, he did not accept it). 

Hal Ashby directed five of the most beloved and influential films of the 1970s (“Harold and Maude,” “The Last Detail,” “Shampoo,” “Coming Home” and “Being There”), but he was nominated for Best Director just once. His only win came in 1967 for Best Editing on Norman Jewison’s racially charged cop thriller “In the Heat of the Night.”

The legendary sportswriter who famously dubbed Notre Dame’s 1920s offensive backfield the “Four Horseman” is probably best known today for posthumously lending his name to ESPN’s short-lived, sports-and-pop-culture website Grantland. But he also produced one-reel documentaries for the U.S. military during World War II, which earned him two Academy Award nominations and one win for 1943’s “Amphibious Fighters.”

He’s one of the most important figures in the history of American filmmaking, but Charlie Chaplin won only one competitive Oscar: Best Original Score in 1973 for the rerelease of “Limelight” (which had been boycotted and quickly banished from theaters in 1952). Chaplin’s Oscar history is bizarre. He received an honorary Oscar for the “versatility and genius” of “The Circus” in 1929 and earned a second honorary trophy for his life’s work in 1972. But when it came to competing against his peers, this was it!

The Academy has always had peculiar eligibility rules for its music awards, which is how Prince could win Best Original Song Score Oscar in 1985 for “Purple Rain” but get completely skunked in the Best Original Song category. The Academy surely had its reasons, but it’s probably not a coincidence that it did away with the Best Original Song Score Award after this ceremony.

Uncle Walt currently holds the record for the most Academy Awards as a producer (59 nominations and 22 wins), and you might be surprised to learn that almost half of his Oscar triumphs were for live-action shorts and documentaries. Think about it a little more, and you’ll remember all of those one- and two-reel nature flicks you watched in school, like “Seal Island,” “Bear Country” and “Grand Canyon.”

Talking Heads lead singer David Byrne branched out into film scoring in 1987 by collaborating with Ryuichi Sakamoto and Cong Su on the soundtrack for Bernardo Bertolucci’s “The Last Emperor,” and like almost everyone else nominated for their contributions to this masterpiece, he went home with an Oscar. It remains his only Academy Award nomination.

The famous ocean explorer and conservationist is probably best known for his diving expeditions and the co-invention of the aqualung. Of course, you know about this through his books and documentaries, primarily “The Silent World,” which you no doubt sat through at least once in science class. That documentary earned Cousteau a Best Documentary Oscar in 1956.

No one getting knocked around a mosh pit at a Nine Inch Nails show in 1991 could’ve had an inkling that this hardcore industrial musician would one day win over the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. But people mellow with age, and Reznor finally chilled out significantly enough to compose (with collaborator Atticus Ross) an emotionally delicate accompaniment to David Fincher’s “The Social Network,” for which he won the 2010 Best Original Score Oscar.

The brilliant deadpan stand-up comedian was a surprise winner of 1989’s Best Live Action Short Oscar with his HBO-produced “The Appointments of Dennis Jennings.” The film, about a morose daydreamer played by Wright, was directed by Dean Parisot (who went on to direct “Galaxy Quest”), and co-stars 2018 Best Supporting Actress nominee Laurie Metcalf. Rowan “Mr. Bean” Atkinson also turns up as Wright’s psychiatrist.

Taylor Hackford had shown promise as a producer of PBS documentaries in the 1970s when he took a crack at directing with a short live-action film called “Teenage Father” (not to be confused with the Afterschool Special "Schoolboy Father" starring Rob Lowe and Dana Plato). The “realistic” drama earned him an Oscar and his first feature-directing gig (on 1980s “The Idolmaker”). He’s been a familiar face at the Academy Awards ever since (most notably with “An Officer and a Gentleman” and “Ray”).

This is surprising in that George Bernard Shaw belongs to the pre-motion picture era of the theater. He was 72 in 1929 when the first Academy Awards were handed out and 81 when producer Gabriel Pascal persuaded him to adapt his play “Pygmalion” for the big-screen in 1938. Upon winning Best Adapted Screenplay, Shaw, who did not attend the ceremony, stated, “It’s an insult for them to offer me any honor, as if they had never heard of me before – and it’s very likely they never have.”

Martin McDonagh was already one of the most celebrated playwrights of his generation when he decided to try his luck as a filmmaker with the short film “Six Shooter.” The pitch-black comedy won the Best Live Action Short Oscar in 2005, laying the groundwork for a hugely successful filmmaking career that has thus far earned him two Best Original Screenplay nominations for “In Bruges” and “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.”

If you’ve read Mark Harris’ excellent “Five Came Back” (or watched the equally excellent Netflix documentary), you know that some of Hollywood’s most well-known filmmakers gave of their time and talent to help promote the United States’ efforts to win World War II and, basically, save civilization. These films were, not surprisingly, favored by the Academy in the Best Documentary Short category from 1942 to 1946, bringing Oscar glory to the Navy, Marines, Army and the Department of War.

The ultra-competitive Kobe Bryant added an Oscar to his cluttered trophy case by teaming with legendary Disney editor Glen Keane for this short film based on Kobe Bryant's retirement poem, which was initially published in The Players' Tribune. Considering that the film industry in based in the city where he won five NBA titles, it's not a surprise that he came out on top over a Pixar short. Had Kobe lost, the tenacious superstar probably would've insisted Keane continue to make animated short films until they finally won.