Watch a young Steven Spielberg and friends goof around while watching the 1976 Oscar nominations (VIDEO)

Long before he became the Academy darling he is today, Oscar-winning filmmaker Steven Spielberg was known mostly for his crowd-pleasing blockbuster movies. That's the Spielberg you'll see in this excerpt from a 1976 TV program called “TVTV Looks at the Academy Awards,” as the director and his colleagues react to their first-ever Oscar nominations for "Jaws."

In the mid-1970s (this was pre-“Raiders of the Lost Ark” or “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial”), Spielberg simply the guy who had made “Jaws,” a movie that helped Hollywood establish the model for summer tentpole filmmaking. Not only did “Jaws” earn some serious bank – nearly $470 million worldwide (that’s nearly $2 billion when adjusted for inflation) – but it also snagged the then-29-year-old director his first of many Best Picture Oscar nominations.

Thankfully for Spielberg, his fans, and film historians, a television crew happened to be on hand at the time of said Oscar nom. Prior to the nomination broadcast, the young filmmaker introduces himself to TV audiences as "Steve" Spielberg and jokes that "Jaws" is going to sweep the field in all 11 categories. "Jaws" ended up being nominated in four categories altogether (not a bad tally), including Best Film Editing, Best Original Score, and Best Sound.

After all of the nominations are read, the director and his colleagues seem genuinely confused that "Jaws" was nominated for Best Picture, but that its filmmaker was not nominated for Best Director -- a frequent complaint and recurring issue for anyone familiar with the Oscars. Spielberg shouldn't really have been surprised, though. The 1976 Oscars featured some ridiculously stiff competition in the form of legendary directors Robert Altman, Federico Fellini, Stanley Kubrick, Sidney Lumet, and Miloš Forman.

If only Spielberg could know that he would be nominated for Best Director just two years later for "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."