Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans picked up 17 awards in the last awards season, including a Best Picture award at the American Film Institute Awards (AFI Awards) and a Golden Globe for Best Drama. Spielberg also received the National Board of Review for Best Director. The Fabelmans received seven nominations at this year’s Oscars. It was a favorite, alongside “Everything Everywhere All At Once” and “Nothing New in the West”. “The Fabelmans” won out of the seven nominations: not a single one.
Oscar Analysis:
Spielberg, 76, is considered the most successful filmmaker in Hollywood history, and he has a place in the top ten most important filmmakers according to many critics and viewers alike. He finds himself in it alongside Hitchcock, Godard, Scorsese, Kubrick, Fellini, Hawks and other greats who have died or are alive (but that would soon fill the top ten).
But something isn’t going well for him anymore, but it’s not going well either for him – since his last director’s Oscar, his second overall, for “Saving Private Ryan”, symbolically heavy 25 years have passed. The war drama didn’t receive the more important Best Picture award at the time, however, and Spielberg went away empty-handed as a producer because Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein waged a hard campaign against the film in order to push through his own lightweight, the Shakespeare-for-high school graduates Play “Shakespeare in Love”.
After all, Spielberg has been a director’s legend since “Ryan” – at the age of 51, the former “Hollywood prodigy” has achieved this status, a unique position. After “Ryan”, Spielberg has been nominated a whopping 13 times to date, whether as director, producer or screenwriter. Makes an average of one nomination every 1.5 years, up to the “Fabelmans”.
It’s not that Steven Spielberg hasn’t struggled with the Academy many times before. His defeats in the 1980s are legendary. “The Color Purple”: ten nominations, but not even one for him as a director – so no nomination for him in that professional function, after all, which holds many top performers together in a joint effort.
But what must have made his defeat with the “Fabelmans” so bitter for him is the fact that maybe 20 years ago with this film – he was 56 and could have brought this quasi-autobiography to the cinema – with some probability would have been awarded as the winner of the evening. It looks like its time is up.
What is the reason Spielberg fell out of favor? Has he fallen out of favor at all? Or is it rather the case that his films are nice to look at, but no longer have any effect? For one thing, his decline since the early noughties is actually related to the quality of his films. All works since “Saving Private Ryan” are – apart from the even fantastic “AI-Artificial Intelligence” from 2001, which has not been considered with big nominations, as well as the no less fantastic “Munich” from 2005, which was nominated many times but went empty-handed – good, you are neat, maybe even perfect in terms of craftsmanship. But that’s exactly the problem. They’re good, but not very good. Because they lack the Spielberg magic of the special film. This perfect smoothness, this smoothness, applies to all the works for which he recently received (director) nominations: “War Horse”, “Lincoln”, “Bridge of Spies”, “The Post” and “West Side Story”. Spielberg knows who to round up and who to stage and how. But he doesn’t have much more to say about today. Nothing that moves people. The Fabelmans is a chronicle, Spielberg’s chronicle, but it’s not a guide for others. And that’s what matters at award ceremonies (unfortunately).
The Fabelmans is a good but also old-fashioned film. A man approaching 80 tells how, as the son of parents who are separating, he finds his way into filmmaking, how he finds strength in the breakup of the family and how he transfers this strength to directing films.
Strictly speaking, The Fabelmans is a blatant zero-in-a-hundred success story. Spielberg doesn’t have many enemies in Hollywood, but that doesn’t mean he has too many friends there instead. Most of them respect him above all else. You shouldn’t mess with him. This is a position of power. But that alone does not have to be enough to be showered with awards by the people sitting in the Oscar Academy – and of all things for an autobiographical film that describes how Spielberg became the best man in Hollywood.
Or: In 2003 that might have been enough, but in 2023 it will no longer be enough. Since then, the Oscar committee has around four times as many members. It is more diverse. More diverse in terms of gender, ethnicity and nationality distribution. With a number of people who were never patronized by him. Who are too young to have been in his hit streak from 1975 to 1998. Many like to see Spielberg as an “old white man”, i.e. also as a man who is mentally old and thinks white. That’s nonsense, just look at the cast list of his “Ready Player One” (2018). But it’s certainly no coincidence that Cate Blanchett, the leading actress in Todd Field’s “Tár”, the best film of the past year, also went away empty-handed. She plays the role of a woman who many see not as a woman but as an old white man.
The big winner is “Everything Everywhere All At Once”. He received seven awards, including Michelle Yeoh, who outperformed Blanchett, and Ke Huy Quan – a sensation because he was completely signed off after his 80s roles as Short Round and Data. Everything Everywhere All At Once represents the films and actors who have a better chance today because they are chosen by people on a jury that is much broader today than it was ten years ago.
That’s not unfair: No film had more nominations this year than “Everything Everywhere All At Once” (11), and with seven awards it received a corresponding spread of approval. It is the highest-grossing film at the Academy Awards since 2008’s Slumdog Millionaire, which received eight awards at the time. But it is astonishing that he received so many at all: Because the Academy recently presented itself in the awarding of prizes more diverse – some would say: fairer. The fact that the respective “Best Films” of a year only received two or three Oscars (“Moonlight”, “Spotlight”) became the rule, even if this sparse gift seemed counter-intuitive: How can a “Best Film” be like that collect a few outstanding individual achievements? For many years, the “Best Film” acted like a consolation prize. Some critics are already sneering that “Everything Everywhere All At Once” unites so many diversities (“Whites” plus “Asians”) that you can stack them up to a fat multiple win to still be diverse for the Oscar award in 2023 to permit. But “Everything Everywhere All At Once” is not an Oscar film “with announcement”, like “Slumdog Millionaire” was not an Oscar film “with announcement”. But a surprise hit.
This is not good news for Steven Spielberg. Two years ago, he received praise for the most Hollywood-esque of all Hollywood material, the remake of the musical “West Side Story”, but no outstanding awards. Though he made his cast far more diverse than that in Robert Wise’s 1961 film.
Spielberg shouldn’t really complain about the current defeat. He already has three Oscars (two directors, one producer), which is more than his idols Hitchcock and Kubrick ever got. He will continue to make high-ambition films, “award-season films.” He comes from a prolific family with parents who lived very long. His mother lived to the age of 97 and his father to 103. But if he has already been punished for the story of his own life that he unfolds in “Fabelmans”, which one can come next?
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