“What Was I Made For?” by Billie Eilish and Finneas won the Oscar for best original song on Sunday (March 10), becoming the first song in a generation to sweep both the Grammy for song of the year and the Oscar for best original song. The hypnotic ballad, which the siblings wrote for Barbie, won the Grammy on Feb. 4.
It’s the first song to win both of these awards since “My Heart Will Go On,” the unsinkable ballad from Titanic. The song, made famous by Celine Dion, won the Grammy for song of the year in February 1999, 11 months after winning the Oscar for best original song. That means “What Was I Made For?” is the first song in Eilish’s lifetime to achieve this double victory, and that none had achieved it since Finneas was 18 months old.
Eilish and Finneas’ “No Time to Die” won the Oscar two years ago and won a Grammy for best song written for visual media. That’s an important Grammy category, but it’s not song of the year, where songs from film and TV must compete with all other songs submitted that year. That’s been the ultimate songwriting Grammy since the awards were first presented in 1959.
Henry Mancini & Johnny Mercer are the only songwriters to win both of these awards twice. Barbra Streisand popularized two of these double winners, but she co-wrote – and thus won for – only one of them.
