Tony Curtis, Jamie Lee’s Hungarian Jewish father, was one of the biggest stars of Golden Age Hollywood yet received only one Oscar nomination, in 1959 for The Defiant Ones.
The Fabelmans, Spielberg’s highly personal dramatization of his Jewish upbringing, didn’t win a single one of the Oscars it was nominated for Sunday night.
The film lost out on the biggest categories, including best picture, director, actress, and original screenplay, all to Everything Everywhere All At Once.
But while the most Jewish movie came up empty-handed, other Jewish stories played out on cinema’s biggest night.
Host Jimmy Kimmel deployed The Fabelmans as his favorite punchline, using his monologue to drop a series of jokes about the film, including dubbing Spielberg and star Seth Rogen “the Joe and Hunter Biden of Hollywood”.
The late-night television presenter speculated that nominated co-star Judd Hirsch was actually absentee Tom Cruise in a mask, and warned anyone plotting to slap him Will Smith-style, “You’re gonna have to go through the Fabelman to get to me.”
Later, Kimmel kept up the joke, introducing Paul Dano and Julia Louis-Dreyfus to present an award.
Kimmel billed them as “Steven Spielberg’s dad and Jonah Hill’s mom,” referencing not only Dano’s role in “The Fabelmans,” but also Louis-Dreyfus’ part as a clueless white Jewish mother in the much-maligned Netflix film You People.
“All Quiet on the Western Front,” Netflix’s grueling drama about German soldiers on the frontlines of World War I, ended the night with four Oscars: international feature film, original score, cinematography, and production design.
In addition to having a Jewish producer, the movie was also adapted from a novel and 1930 film that both met the ire of the Nazi party and were tarred as Jewish plots to destroy the German state.
Another anti-dictator winner on Sunday was “Guillermo Del Toro’s Pinocchio,” which won the animated feature Oscar. Set in Fascist Italy, the Netflix film features a scene of Pinocchio mocking Il Duce himself, Benito Mussolini.
One of the most heartwarming moments of the evening was the best supporting actor win for Ke Huy Quan for Everything Everywhere All At Once.
Quan, a former child actor, had abandoned his onscreen career for decades before his big comeback role last year.
In his emotional acceptance speech, Quan gave a special shout-out to “my Goonies brother for life,” Jeff Cohen — a Jewish former child star turned entertainment lawyer.
Cohen and Quan appeared in “The Goonies” together in 1985, and when Quan landed his big “Everything Everywhere” role, Cohen negotiated the terms of his deal.
Another winner with a Jewish father was the writer-director-actor Sarah Polley, who won best adapted screenplay for Women Talking.
Polley explored the secret of her biological parentage in her 2013 documentary Stories We Tell. Women Talking is set inside a different religious community: an isolated Mennonite society in which the women have been systematically, sexually abused by the men.
The winner for best documentary went to a profile of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, whose 2020 poisoning by KGB agents after he publicly criticized Vladimir Putin was an international scandal.
Navalny is currently imprisoned in Russian solitary confinement, but the filmmakers dedicated the award to him.
The documentary also details an aspect of Navalny’s campaign more controversial to Western observers: his onetime support of the “Russian march,” a gathering of Russian neo-Nazi organisations.
Drawing blanks, however, was “Tár,” the cerebral classical-music psychological drama with somewhat inexplicable Jewish themes.
