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Two iconic filmmakers, Steven Spielberg and Ang Lee, are competing for the most coveted Oscars this year: Best Director and Best Picture. Spielberg’s drama Lincoln has received 12 Oscar nominations, and Ang Lee’s Life of Pi is trailing with 11. It’s unclear who, among the five nominees for Best Director, will win but both Spielberg and Lee have left their mark on contemporary American cinema. With Lincoln, Steven Spielberg created not only an Oscar-worthy film but a new classic. Spielberg has been a force in Hollywood for nearly four decades. His first big success was Jaws, about the hunt for a killer shark off the coast of New York's Long Island. It won three academy awards and established Spielberg as a master of suspense, a title he reclaimed with his science fiction film, Close encounters of the Third Kind. A few years later, Spielberg returned with E.T. the Extraterrestrial, the poignant story of a boy who befriends an alien stranded on earth. It became the top grossing film of all time. Other blockbusters, like the Indiana Jones trilogy, followed. From the adventures, Spielberg turned to historical dramas. His crowning achievement was the 1993 Holocaust epic, Schindler’s List, based on the story of Oskar Schindler, who risked his life to save more than a thousand Jews from the gas chambers. The film earned Spielberg his first Academy Awards - for Best Director and Best Picture. | 
