I can tell you that after 22 years of covering the Oscars that they are mostly meaningless. It’s a game of publicists and bloggers like me who function as lobbyists of a sort. You can see I have ads for The Fabelmans on this site, prominently displayed. It’s how I make a living and how the awards industry survives. So maybe you’ll look at those ads and think I believe Spielberg should win because they’re paying me to say that. But you’d be wrong, though I can’t stop you from thinking it.
Voting for Spielberg for Best Director (and Top Gun: Maverick for Best Picture) is an easy call for me. I have no problem, after all of these years, understanding why people should win awards. They should win them when they have reached the apex of their careers. The dirty little secret that no one will tell you is that what makes people great isn’t sudden success. It isn’t being plucked out of obscurity like The Daniels or Michel Hazanavicious or Tom Hooper. No, it’s the fight. It’s the struggle. It’s everything a filmmaker does in their career to becomes GOOD ENOUGH to win an Oscar. That is what makes a filmmaker great.
For some reason, we live in the long echo of the past, where Orson Welles somehow made Citizen Kane at the age of 24 and that he deserved to win for that. I started my website trying to answer the question of why he didn’t. Welles defies my own theory here because he never achieved the same kind of greatness again. Whether he won the Oscar or not, that would be true. But hitting a career high at such a young age often leaves an artist nowhere to go but down.
That doesn’t mean they will win when they should, after they’ve tried again and again to land the win. David Fincher should have won for The Social Network. Quentin Tarantino should have won for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. But a part of me is glad they didn’t because it means they’re still in the fight.
Giving a third Oscar to Spielberg is what the Oscars were designed for: to reward extraordinary work and body of work. Winning as a one-off is a curse. That won’t dissaude voters from wanting to anoint a new King or Queen for a day, but it’s still important to remember what Oscars can do and what they can’t do.
I’ve written many times over the years of the old Robin Williams joke that the Oscars are about Miss Right Now, but never Miss Right. That is why so many of their choices, especially lately, don’t stand the test of time. While they always were a bubble and they always were a time capsule to reveal who Oscar voters are, these days it’s much worse. They are more cut off than ever before. They are more insulated. And it’s killing what remains of the film industry.
What The Daniels did with Everything Everywhere All At Once was vibrant and inventive and interesting. But to win an award this big this early is going to condemn to a fate they don’t deserve. I mean, I guess we’ll see how that goes. Their film speaks to a certain portion of the population right now: intersectional, migrating to virtual spaces, the old making way for and accepting the new. At its heart it’s a sweet family story between a mother, daughter, and husband. It resonates with many.
But I can’t look at 2023 and not see Spielberg everywhere. I see him in the year’s best and most successful film, Top Gun: Maverick. I see him even in The Daniels’ film. I see his entire career playing out not unlike that movie.
And don’t worry. I know he’s not going to win. I’ve been doing this job way too long to not know that. But he should. He should.
A writer who says it much better is Noah Gittell, who makes the case for Spielberg to win his third, “‘The Fabelmans’ Is Steven Spielberg at His Bravest. Give Him the Best Director Oscar”:
If one of the qualifications for winning Best Director is creative courage, Spielberg would win in a walk. It’s downright brave to cast off the safety and security of science fiction, which provided a harbor for him for so long; to proceed without the guardrails and signposts of genre; and to muck around in the puddles of his own life and find a narrative that feels both universal and true to his own experience. In prior films, he could lead with spectacle and let his unconscious provide the emotional truth. Here, he proceeds with intent, wrestling his real life into something just as cinematic as a shark attack, an alien landing, or a T. rex ripping someone to shreds. There are scenes in The Fabelmans that feel as awe-inspiring as anything in Spielberg’s filmography: young Sammy watching a movie projected onto his cupped hands or Mitzi dancing in the headlights of their car, backed by the first notes of John Williams’s delightfully inscrutable score. In the film’s climax, Sammy’s documentary chronicling his classmates’ day at the beach becomes a way of neutralizing his antisemitic bully (or maybe Sammy just wanted to make his movie better). These scenes look and feel like nothing else Spielberg has ever done.
To be this creative and this honest at once is an amazing feat, and while The Fabelmans is not always as literal of a representation of his childhood as we might assume, it offers the kind of truth only cinema can provide. Even with the best intentions, memory is not fact, and the very process of wrangling one’s childhood into a satisfying narrative necessitates dramatic embellishments and leaps of imagination. In certain scenes, you can even feel Spielberg balancing his childhood view of events with one revised by the perspectives of adulthood. When Sammy’s father, Burt (Paul Dano), announces the divorce to the Fabelman children, he claims it was all his idea, a half-truth Spielberg believed for decades, leading him to at one point cut off contact with his father completely. But in the same scene, Mitzi admits she has fallen in love with someone else. Both the old lie and the new truth are voiced at once, with the children left to decide what really happened for themselves. In a bit of movie magic, Spielberg evokes the fog of confusion he felt as a child and didn’t understand until much later.
