Steven Spielberg at last weekend's 75th annual Writers Guild Awards in New York. Photo: AP
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Steven Spielberg at last weekend's 75th annual Writers Guild Awards in New York. Photo: AP
This is Oscars weekend, and I’m going for broke. I’m putting it all on The Fabelmans as most likely to take Best Picture and Steven Spielberg to walk away with Best Director.
As with most years, the Best Picture Oscar nominees represent the diverse range cinema has to offer. While there are a few firsts (most notably, Michelle Yeoh being the first Asian woman ever nominated in the Best Actress category), it’s a relatively conservative mix overall.
In the running for Best Picture, you’ve got your musical candidate in Elvis; “popular” box-office fodder in Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water; alternative, black comedies in The Banshees of Inisherin and Triangle of Sadness; a war epic in All Quiet on the Western Front (also ticking the box for Best Foreign Language film); quirky indie movie in Everything Everywhere All at Once; and even one for the girls, Women Talking.
Then we come to Spielberg’s aforementioned crowd-pleasing, coming-of-age drama The Fabelmans. If my money is on anything, it’s that The Fabelmans will bag the two most coveted awards.
It is practically flawless, with every moment reminding you of the mastery of its director
First off, you can’t deny the Academy loves movies about movies. That has been the case for such recent Best Picturewinners as Argo and The Artist, while other winning features over the years have included La La Land, Hugo, The Aviator, Sunset Boulevard and Cinema Paradiso.
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It makes sense, as the Academy Awards are all about celebrating cinema as an art form. The Oscars also reflect Hollywood, in that it loves a comeback. If The Fabelmans wins, it will be Spielberg’s first Best Picture winner since Schindler’s List (1994), and if he wins for directing, it will be his third Best Director Oscar after Schindler’s and 1998’s Saving Private Ryan.
There are a couple of dark horses in the running, most notably The Banshees of Inisherin and Everything Everywhere All at Once.
However, while both have several die-hard fans, they’ve also proved divisive with many viewers “not getting” them – or just plain disliking them. A similar pattern can be seen in the 2018 Best Picture selection, when Green Book beat period black comedy The Favourite and black-and-white drama Roma.
Gabriel LaBelle, Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Keeley Karsten, Julia Butters and Sophia Kopera in The Fabelmans
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Gabriel LaBelle, Michelle Williams, Paul Dano, Keeley Karsten, Julia Butters and Sophia Kopera in The Fabelmans
The Fabelmans is a film that reminds us of the labour of love that goes into making a movie, and no one could have told it better than Spielberg. Based on his own life and family, the personal aspects of it really shine through. It is practically flawless, with every moment reminding you of the mastery of its director, who has perfected the craft of film-making over a 50-plus years career.
Moreover, it has that feel-good factor going for it, and if last year’s Best Picture movie CODA taught us anything, it’s that in this post-pandemic world, audiences are craving something optimistic and just plain nice.
In a world in which streaming services are increasingly taking business away from cinemas (and it’s interesting that aside from Netflix war epic All Quiet on the Western Front, there aren’t many streaming movies in the running this year), there’s something really affecting about being brought back to the roots of what the Oscars are all about.
Part of that is going for a ‘safe’ option, which The Fabelmans also represents.