what she has actually won

the three grammys

• best pop vocal album — sweetener (2019). the award for the record explicitly about the year after manchester. she did not attend the ceremony, which was its own story at the time.
• best pop duo/group performance — rain on me, with lady gaga (2021). a pandemic-era single that two of the biggest vocalists in pop made from separate rooms.
• best pop duo/group performance — defying gravity, with cynthia erivo (2026). the odd one of the three: a showtune written in 2003, recorded live on a film set, beating four contemporary pop singles in a pop category.

three wins from twenty nominations is a low conversion rate for somebody with nine number ones, and it is worth being straight about why rather than pretending otherwise. the grammys have a long-standing pattern of nominating commercially dominant pop in the general categories and then giving those awards elsewhere, and she has been on the wrong side of that repeatedly. she has never won in any of the four general categories — record, album or song of the year, or best new artist.

the 2026 win, which nobody predicted

defying gravity went into best pop duo/group performance against apt. by bruno mars and rosé, golden from k-pop demon hunters, gabriela by katseye, and 30 for 30 by sza and kendrick lamar. it was the only entry in the category that was not a contemporary pop single, and it was widely written off. it won.

the reading that makes sense of it: the recording academy's pop field votes on vocal performance considerably more than the charts do, and the wicked recordings were captured live on set rather than mimed to a playback. it is the first grammy she has won for something that is not a pop record in any sense, and the second she has shared, after rain on me.

the academy award nomination

nominated for best supporting actress for glinda in wicked, at the ceremony held in early 2025. she did not win. she took the golden globe nomination in the same category that year, and another in 2026 for wicked: for good, and has not won either.

the nomination is the significant thing regardless of the result. a pop musician being nominated for a film musical gets called a stunt by default, and this one was not: it came out of a self-taped audition, a role she had wanted since she was a teenager, and a performance with real technical singing underneath a comic one. the fuller version is in the wicked piece.

and the sequence is worth stating plainly, because it is genuinely strange: the film she was nominated for an oscar for went on to win her a grammy two years later, for a song nobody in her camp wrote.

the ones that are not worth counting

the awards worth naming are the ones with a voting body that is not the audience: the three grammys, the academy award nomination, the two golden globe nominations, a 2019 brit for international female solo artist, and — outside her own career — the fact that wicked itself was nominated for best picture.

the emmy nomination is the one nobody has heard of — outstanding variety special, for wicked: one wonderful night, in 2026. it did not win either, and it is on the table only because it is juried rather than voted on by an audience.