Why Michael Douglas thought Steven Spielberg cost him an acting award
Despite his universal acclaim and numerous honours, including an Academy Award for ‘Best Actor’, Michael Douglas has never been awarded ‘Best Actor’ at the Cannes Film Festival. Douglas has been featured in a number of films that appeared in competition at the French festival, but he has yet to walk away with any hardware. When his 2013 Steven Soderbergh film Behind the Candelabra premiered at Cannes, Douglas felt that another prominent industry figure influenced voters not to give him the gong.
“Steven Spielberg was president of the Cannes Film Festival the year that I was there at Cannes,” Douglas claimed during his appearance on Variety‘s ‘Actors on Actors’ series. “The rumour was that I was sort of favoured for the best actor award and that he put the kibosh on that because it was an HBO film — a film for television even though it had played theatrically.”
“My feeling is that they’ve got to really loosen this up,” Douglas added. “Certainly, it can play in a theatre for a week or two, but then it should be entitled to be treated as a movie.” Thanks to his performance in Nebraska, Bruce Dern took home that year’s award for ‘Best Actor’.
Spielberg had been notoriously traditionalist when it came to the increasing prevalence of streaming services in the film industry. He was one of the few highly acclaimed directors to resist the calls of Netflix, at least until he signed a deal with the company in 2021. To Spielberg, the current streaming boom parallels the past history of Hollywood.
“[TV] is a challenge to cinema the same way television in the early 1950s pulled people away from movie theaters and everybody stayed home, because it was more fun to stay home and watch a comedy on television in the 1950s than it was to go out and see a movie,” Spielberg told ITV in 2018. “So Hollywood’s used to that, we’re accustomed to being highly competitive with television.”
“The difference today is that a lot of studios would rather just make branded, tentpole, guaranteed box office hits from their inventory of branded successful movies than take chances on smaller films,” He added. “And those smaller films the studios used to make routinely are now going to Amazon and Hulu and Netflix,” he added.
Spielberg’s opinions haven’t changed much in the years since, even as the Covid-19 pandemic radically altered the moviegoing experience. “The pandemic created an opportunity for streaming platforms to raise their subscriptions to record-breaking levels and also throw some of my best filmmaker friends under the bus as their movies were unceremoniously not given theatrical releases,” Spielberg told The New York Times. “They were paid off, and the films were suddenly relegated to, in this case, HBO Max. The case I’m talking about. And then everything started to change.”
There was one film that boosted Spielberg’s faith in moviegoing audiences: Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. “I found it encouraging that Elvis broke $100million at the domestic box office,” he said. “A lot of older people went to see that film, and that gave me hope that people were starting to come back to the movies as the pandemic becomes an endemic. I think movies are going to come back. I really do.”
Check out Douglas’ performance in Behind the Candelabra down below.
