Best Director: Steven Spielberg, Jaws
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.
An Honor Not to Be Nominated
- Best Actor: Fred Astaire, Top Hat
- Best Actor: Cary Grant, His Girl Friday
- Best Actor: Bill Murray, Groundhog Day
- Best Actress: Barbara Stanwyck, The Lady Eve
- Best Director: John Ford, The Searchers
- Best Director: Martin Scorsese, Taxi Driver
- Best Director: Steven Spielberg, Jaws
- Best Picture: King Kong
- Best Picture: Some Like It Hot
- Best Picture: The Dark Knight
