AND THE NOMINEE ISN'T...STEVEN SPIELBERG FOR JAWS

Dune may be nominated by 10 Academy Awards at this year's 94th Oscars but missing from that list of nominees is Denis Villeneuve for Best Director.

Not that he is the first surprise missing Best Director nominee. To quote Harry Meadows from Jaws, it's happened before.

Just look no further than Steven Spielberg and Jaws, the 1975 shark thriller may have been nominated for Best Film and won Best Editor, for Verna Fields, but Spielberg didn't even get a look in in the Director category.

Famously, he even had a TV crew film the Oscar nomination announcements for 1976. Both a commercial and a critical hit, you can see where his hopes must have been set high, but as this footage they were soon to be dashed.

And although Villeneuve is not nominated this year, Steven Spielberg is for West Side Story. And that nomination alone means that he has been nominated in the Best Director category over the last six decades. He's the only director to have achieved that recognition, not a bad Oscar record for this vicinity.

If it is any conciliation to Villeneuve, who was nominated for a Best Director Oscar for Arrival in 2017, Alfred Hitchcock never won an Oscar for one of his films. And he wasn't even nominated for Vertigo, but did receive nominations for Psycho, Rear Window, Spellbound, Rebecca and Lifeboat.

Words by Dean Newman

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