The New Yorker:
More than in most years, the doctrine of dueness has dominated the 2024 awards season.
By Justin Chang
“This is the first time I’ve ever had one of these in my hand.” So declared Steven Spielberg, with visible awe and relief, when he accepted the Academy Award for Best Director thirty years ago, for “Schindler’s List” (1993). Minutes later, as he and his fellow-producers clutched their statuettes for Best Picture, he gushed, “This is the best drink of water after the longest drought in my life!” Spielberg, then forty-seven, was overdue for Oscar glory and didn’t bother to hide that he knew it. You couldn’t really fault his impatience, or the eagerness of this Hollywood wunderkind to be recognized by his peers as a real artist. He had already lost in the directing race three times, for “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” (1977), “Raiders of the Lost Ark” (1981), and “E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial” (1982); the latter two films were also nominated for Best Picture and lost. Before “Schindler’s List,” the last Spielberg movie to find itself in serious Oscar contention was “The Color Purple” (1985), and it blanked in all ten of its nominated categories—which, glaringly, did not include Best Director.
As I’ve thought about this year’s Oscar race, Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List” moment has crept back into my thoughts, for two reasons. One is that Jonathan Glazer’s film “The Zone of Interest,” easily the best of the current crop of Best Picture nominees, also happens to be a drama about the Holocaust, albeit one that could scarcely differ more radically from “Schindler’s List.” (Spielberg expressed his admiration for “The Zone of Interest” in a recent interview, describing it, with more than a touch of self-congratulation, as “the best Holocaust movie I’ve witnessed since my own.”) The other reason is that this year’s Oscar derby, even more so than usual, seems preoccupied with the condition of what I’ll call dueness, or even overdueness—the sense that some of this year’s front-runners don’t just deserve that statuette based on their latest work but that they’ve deserved it—and been denied it—for much too long.
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