The opposite of Sally Field’s gushing “You like me, you really like me” upon winning an Oscar was Steven Spielberg’s response when his first big movie, Jaws, was nominated for Best Picture but stiffed in the Best Director category. Jaws had only become the top-grossing film since The Sound of Music a decade before, and Spielberg had managed to wrangle Bruce — the production’s balky mechanical shark — into a creature of demonic intent and satanic power. The tarring of Spielberg as a maker of “just movies” would continue through Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial, for which he was nominated but lost. The year of E.T., the Academy gave the Best Picture and Director prizes to Richard Attenborough’s worthy but plodding Gandhi. Spielberg had to make his only true-life epic, Schindler’s List, before he finally won an Oscar.
