The nominees were ...
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Steven Spielberg had (and after last year's near blackout for his Lincoln at the awards still seems to have) a curiously troubled relationship with the Academy. No filmmaker of the latter half of the 20th century had a surer command of the medium of motion pictures than Spielberg, and yet he was continually passed over for Academy Awards. E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was one of the most popular and successful movies of all time, and yet he lost the directing and best picture Oscars to Richard Attenborough and the now little-honored Gandhi. Jaws was a major hit, and helped redefine popular movie entertainment, yet Spielberg was passed over for a directing nomination. The Color Purple received eleven nominations, but none for Spielberg as director, and then proceeded to lose in every category, setting a record for losses tied only by The Turning Point. And so on. But Schindler's List is a film of astonishing power that despite scenes of harrowing brutality doesn't leave its audience brutalized. It had a virtual lock on the best picture and director Oscars, and for once Spielberg was not disappointed. There are those that think it is marred by a few missteps: The decision to allow a little girl's red coat to appear in color amid the otherwise black-and-white filming of the destruction of the Krakow ghetto ruins the powerful documentary effect of the staging for some, and the ending seems to some needlessly didactic to the point of sentimentality. There are hard-liners who believe any depiction of the Holocaust in a popular medium like the movies to be inadequate to the point of vulgarity. But of all of Spielberg's films, it still seems like the one most likely to endure as a cinema classic.
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