Steven Spielberg's awards season sabotage of Michael Douglas
Michael Douglas had it on good authority that he was the frontrunner to pick up a prestigious award, and blamed Steven Spielberg for missing out.
(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Film » Cutting Room Floor
Wed 15 January 2025 3:30, UK
Hollywood can be a duplicitous place at the best of times, with the industry giving rise to its fair share of conspiracy theories. Steven Spielberg has always been viewed as one of the nicest and most wholesome figures in Tinseltown, which makes him the perfect figure to carry out an act of sabotage because nobody would ever believe him capable of such underhanded tactics.
There aren’t many people in or outside the business who’d dare accuse a figure as renowned as Spielberg for playing dirty, but Michael Douglas is one of them. An awards-laden legend in his own right, the actor was convinced that cinema’s highest-grossing director was almost entirely responsible for one of his best performances being shut out of the spotlight.
It might sound like a case of sour grapes, but it’s worth remembering that Douglas knows more about the smoky backroom politics of film than most. Not only was he born into it as the son of Kirk Douglas and Diana Dill, but he’s every bit as accomplished behind the scenes as he is in front of the camera, even damaging his relationship with his father to secure his first Academy Award when he produced ‘Best Picture’ winner One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Douglas scooped his second Oscar for acting in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, earned six Golden Globes and a Primetime Emmy, and has now reached the stage of his career where he’s regularly being handed lifetime achievement trophies for his contributions to the medium.
To illustrate that point, he was bestowed with an honorary ‘Golden Palm’ at Cannes in 2023, despite never being nominated for a competitive prize during the festival itself. However, Douglas maintains that Steven Soderbergh’s Behind the Candelabra shouldn’t have just gotten him on the shortlist but ended up with his name being read aloud onstage, only for Spielberg to purportedly intervene.
“Steven Spielberg was president of the Cannes Film Festival the year that I was there at Cannes,” he told Variety. “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.”
There was no reason why Behind the Candelabra and its makers couldn’t have been in the running for major prizes at Cannes. It might have premiered on the small screen in the United States, but it was released in cinemas in dozens of countries worldwide, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, Hong Kong, and the festival’s native France.
It was nominated for the Palme d’Or, but Douglas was shut out of the acting conversation entirely, while the only prize it won at Cannes was the Palme Dog for its canine co-star Baby Boy’s efforts. Was it because of Spielberg’s subterfuge that the star was snubbed? He certainly seems to think so, especially when he went public with his theory.
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Michael DouglasSteven Spielberg
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