Steven Spielberg kissed his wife and embraced his mother before his left hand floated to his temple in disbelief. Then he grew visibly emotional as he made his way to the stage of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. The 46-year-old Spielberg had just won his first Oscar — as best director for “Schindler’s List,” an unflinching look at the Holocaust and its horrors. “This is a big surprise,” presenter Clint Eastwood said somewhat sarcastically.
As Eastwood’s joke suggests, Spielberg’s victory at the 1994 Academy Awards was preordained — an unavoidable coronation after he had dominated popular culture so completely over the past year. Not only had he subverted his
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