Reception and Impact
Spielberg's impact can be briefly summarized by noting that he is both the most financially successful director of all time, three times directing a movie that set the U.S box-office record, and a director nominated seven times for Best Director at the Oscars, one of the highest totals in history. A brief summary doesn't quite fully encapsulate just how acclaimed and influential a director Spielberg has been throughout his career. Spielberg's films have been nominated for 123 Academy Awards, winning 33 of them. Few directors have directed as many movies regarded as classics as movies like Jaws, Close Encounters, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, Schindler's List, Jurassic Park, Saving Private Ryan, and Minority Report, often show up on best movie lists and are among the most watched movies ever made. Spielberg's most profound impact on the film industry has been his importance to blockbuster films, beginning with Jaws and continuing with the Indiana Jones series. Spielberg is easily the most recognizable modern director to the average person and has been picked by many publications as the greatest director of all time. Despite his overall critical and financial success, Spielberg might be the most criticized major director in film history. Most of the criticism of Spielberg comes in two argument: One is that his films are sentimental, safe, and uninteresting thematically. Second, is that many people see Spielberg as the catalyst for the dumbing down of Hollywood filmmaking. Noted film critic Pauline Kael once remarked that Spielberg was "infantilizing the audience, reconstituting the spectator as child, then overwhelming him and her with sound and spectacle, obliterating irony, aesthetic self-consciousness, and critical reflection." Famous French director Jean Luc Godard has long criticized Spielberg for causing the lack of sophistication in American film, as well as what Godard sees as Spielberg's use of the Holocaust to make a profit in Schindler's List. While both criticisms of his sentimentality and dumbing down Hollywood avery partially true, they are a tad unfair to Spielberg who has gone on to have an incredible career despite his flaws. One could argue that many of his greatest films are as good as they are because of his sentimental streak and although he did essentially create the modern blockbuster, he can't really be blamed for the quality of movies that he has nothing to do with. Even though his films don't carry the thematic weight of someone such as Ingmar Bergman or his contemporaries like Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese there's nothing inherently wrong with his approach to filmmaking and as his awards and box office receipts show, the results speak for themselves.
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