Steven Spielberg ranks at number one on the list of most commercially successful filmmakers in history, apart from being heavily decorated with accolades. Ever since he stepped into Hollywood, those around him knew that the man was going to rock the entertainment and he did nothing less. After becoming a household name thanks to Jaws, Steven Spielberg’s graph has only gone upward.
And if you thought Steven Spielberg was done reaching new milestones, you couldn’t be more wrong. Recently, the filmmaker found himself on the receiving end of an Oscar nomination in a category that became the first of his extensive career – Best Original Screenplay.
Steven Spielberg Receives a Career First Nomination
In 2022, Steven Spielberg came out with The Fabelmans which is a semi-autobiographical story loosely based on the filmmaker’s young life. Spielberg penned the story beautifully with the help of screenwriter, Tony Kushner, who is one of the few playwrights to have been nominated for many prestigious awards, including the Oscars and the Grammys.
The Spielberg-Kushner duo was nominated at this year’s Oscars, the 95th Academy Awards, in the category ‘Best Original Screenplay’ for The Fabelmans. And while they lost the award to Everything Everywhere All at Once’s Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, Spielberg couldn’t have been happier for the recognition.
Talking to Deadline, Spielberg opened up about what the nomination meant to him.
“I just recently turned 76, where they say, ‘What’s left to accomplish?’ I suddenly get nominated for the first time in my career by the Academy as a co-author of Best screenplay — it made me feel like all those English and creative writing classes paid off!”
Although Spielberg couldn’t win the award, the nomination might have sent him on a new journey and perhaps one of these upcoming years could see the filmmaker actually bag an Oscar for his writing.
Spielberg had begun with this project in the late 90s’ but something or the other always kept the project withheld. The filmmaker finally got the motivation to work on the film after the passing of his parents.
“I had to be ready to tell the story and I wasn’t for a long time and for a lot of reasons. I guarded my privacy jealously through the smokescreen of science fiction, adventure or historical fiction…When you’re orphaned, you don’t know what that feels like until it happens. It’s profound, it has profound consequences.”
Despite Spielberg pouring his heart and soul into the film, The Fabelmans could only make $45 million at the box office, just a few million above the $40 million budget.
Steven Spielberg Has an Unusual Oscar Record
Among the many achievements of Spielberg’s career, perhaps this one takes the cake for being the most interesting. According to a report by MovieWeb, God is not the most thanked entity when it comes to Oscar acceptance speeches.
In the report, it is stated that The Academy archived over 1400 Oscar acceptance speeches, and an analysis of these speeches in 2015 revealed that Spielberg was the most mentioned name in the winners’ speeches. The filmmaker has been mentioned forty-two times whereas people thanked God only nineteen times. It’s not too surprising that the man responsible for many Oscar-nominated projects would be mentioned the most.
Coming second is the disgraced producer, Harvey Weinstein, with 34 mentions followed by James Cameron’s 28, George Lucas’ 23, and Peter Jackson’s 22.
You can stream The Fabelmans on Showtime Anytime.
Source: Deadline
