Will the most successful filmmaker in history again be snubbed by Academy Award voters?
So far, three critics associations have announced their annual awards. All named "Schindler's List," a searing drama about the Holocaust, as the year's best picture; all chose someone other than Steven Spielberg as best director.Critics have split their votes before, but it's a bad sign for Spielberg. His 1985 "The Color Purple" received 11 Oscar nominations, including one for best picture, but the director was left out. He has been nominated just three times, and his only Oscar is a lifetime achievement award given in 1987.
"I think he's been skunked more than once," said Playboy critic Bruce Williamson, a member of the New York Film Critics Circle, which narrowly chose "The Piano" director Jane Campion over Spielberg for its best-director award Wednesday. "I think it's really peculiar. It makes me wonder if he's just too rich and successful."
Oscar followers have offered a couple of theories on Spielberg's failure to score with Academy Award voters.
Over the past 20 years, the Academy has come to prefer slow, "serious" works such as "Dances With Wolves," "The Last Emperor" and "Gandhi," rather than big commercial films, especially adventures, Spielberg's specialty.
Also, it has long been believed that the industry resents Spiel-berg's astonishing success. He was not even 30 when he made "Jaws." By age 40, he had directed "E.T. the Extra-Terrestial" and "Raiders of the Lost Ark."
Earlier this week, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association also selected Campion over Spielberg. Association president Henry Sheehan, a critic with the Orange County Register, said his peers have no grudge against Spielberg.
"People say we deliberately went out of our way to shun Spielberg, but we're not trying to put down anybody, we're trying to honor someone," Sheehan said.
"The critics are not a bunch of boobs. They know `Schindler's List' was best picture and that Spielberg directed the best picture. That doesn't mean the best director is the one who directed the best picture," he said.
One other group of critics also bypassed Spielberg. On Tuesday, the National Board of Review voted "Schindler's List" best picture but cited Martin Scorsese of "The Age of Innocence" as the best director.
Spielberg's film is the sort of movie the Academy likes. It is a three-hour, mostly black-and-white drama about Oskar Schind-ler, a German industrialist who saved more than 1,100 Jews from the Nazis. It stars Liam Neeson.
Never has Spielberg received such a favorable response for a "serious" movie. The New York Times' Janet Maslin praised his "electrifying creative intelligence," while the New Yorker's Terrence Rafferty compared "Schindler's List" to D.W. Griffith's classic "The Birth of a Nation." President Clinton even digressed during a speech about AIDS to offer a plug.
Spielberg, whose publicist did not return a call for comment, has denied making the film to get an Oscar. In Wednesday's Washington Post, he noted that Alfred Hitchcock also never won for best director, though he admitted he wouldn't object to winning himself.
"Well, who wouldn't?" he said. "But I'm certainly not in the business of chasing one. If it finds me someday, even in an honorary way, that's fine. If it never finds me - it wasn't bad for Hitchcock, I don't think it would be bad for me."
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which votes for the Oscars, has a membership of 5,300 directors, actors, techniciansand others in the movie industry. There are 4,698 voting members.
A major test for Spielberg and the Oscars, which will be presented at the end of March, could come March 5 when the winner of the Directors Guild Award is announced. In the award's 45-year history, only three directors have been cited without going on to win the Oscar.
One of them was Spielberg, chosen for "The Color Purple."