Martin Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street will not win an Oscar
MARTIN Scorsese’s biggest box office hit The Wolf of Wall Street is unlikely to win him an Oscar on Monday or its star Leonardo DiCaprio.
Martin Scorsese had to wait 25 years for his first Academy Award.
The Wolf of Wall Street, which despite its R-rating has become the veteran director’s biggest box office hit, is unlikely to earn him a second.
With its graphic depictions of sex, drug use and rampant excess, the film is generally considered too brash for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ notoriously conservative tastes.
Leonardo DiCaprio, who has been nominated for Best Actor for his intensely committed performance as the grotesquely greedy wolf of the title, might also have gone too far for voters.
The 39-year-old A-lister got his first acting nomination in 1994 for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. Twenty years and four more nominations later, he still hasn’t managed to bag one of the coveted statuettes. And most industry observers are tipping that DiCaprio’s acceptance speech will stay folded in his pocket for another year.
Katharine Hepburn once famously said: “The right actors win Oscars, but for the wrong roles.”
She might well have broadened that definition to the people who direct them.
Common wisdom has it that Scorsese’s solitary Oscar — awarded in 2007 for The Departed — was just such a case. Perhaps the Academy’s belated acknowledgment of Scorsese’s skills was a correction of previous mistakes, most notably its snubbing of Raging Bull. The film that pipped it in 1981, Robert Redford’s Ordinary People, was very good. Scorsese’s brutal biopic about 1940s brawler Jake LaMotta, was great.
Should Scorsese and DiCaprio go home empty-handed yet again on March 3, Australian time, the long-time collaborators can console themselves with the knowledge they are in good company.
Since the first Academy Awards were first handed out in 1929 (in a ceremony which took just five minutes!), several directors considered undisputable legends by everyone — everyone, it seems, except the Academy — have gone mystifyingly Oscar-less.
Director, writer and actor Orson Welles worked largely outside the Hollywood studio system and was considered notoriously difficult ... and notoriously under-rewarded.
He often referred to his solitary statuette — received at the 1942 Awards for Best Original Screenplay for Citizen Kane — as “half an Oscar”. Perhaps he was referring to the fact it was a co-write and thus a co-win with Herman J. Mankiewicz.
Yet some consider it his arch commentary on the fact Citizen Kane — aka “the best film ever made” — should by rights have won any combination of Best Film/Director/Actor, too.
Does anybody remember the film that took home the Oscar that night, How Green Was My Valley? Is it taught in cinema studies classes across the globe to this day?
The thinking behind the Academy overlooking Citizen Kane seems to be that it was too controversial a film, that Welles’ and his film’s politics were too overt, or simply that Welles was too big for his boots at just 25 years of age.
If Welles was ahead of his time with Citizen Kane, it took the Academy 30 years to catch up — awarding him an Honorary Oscar in 1971.
A year later, the Academy bestowed a similar honour upon another all-rounder they probably should have rewarded with no need for special consideration 40 years earlier: Charlie Chaplin.
In 1972, the biggest star of film’s silent era had been in self-imposed exile from the US for 20 years; his struggle to adapt to the coming of talking pictures, falling popularity, scandals with women and an FBI investigation into his political leanings all feeding into his departure.
He finally returned, to a standing ovation, at the very end of that year’s Academy Awards, to receive his second Honorary Oscar (his first came at the very first Awards in 1929, when he was recognised for his “versatility and genius” in writing, producing, directing and acting in The Circus).
The 1972 honour was given for “the incalculable effect (Chaplin) has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century”. Yet it is widely believed that Chaplin should have won on merit alone in 1931 for City Lights.
Another staple of “best film ever made” lists, City Lights wasn’t even nominated, likely in disdain at Chaplin refusing to move with the talkies times. (Fun fact: The film that won Best Picture in 1931, Cimarron, now tops the list of “worst Oscar winners of all time”.)
It’s pretty clear why another legendary director, Alfred Hitchcock, was short-changed. Just as people joke today that the Academy doesn’t do comedies, it had no respect during Hitchcock’s heyday for his populist thrillers and genre films (no matter how groundbreaking and influential we know them to be today).
That Hitchcock also appeared on TV (film types looked down their nose at the small-screen medium in those days) and was no great fan of thespians (“Actors should be treated like cattle,” he once remarked) probably didn’t endear him to voters, either.
Hitchcock was nominated for Best Director five times with no gold at the end of the rainbow. His films did receive many nominations, but usually in “lesser” categories such as editing, and even then there was no gold. Only the English director’s first American-made film, Rebecca, took home a Best Picture statuette, leaving classics such as Vertigo, North By Northwest and psycho flapping in the wind.
He finally received a lifetime achievement award from the Academy in 1968.
Stanley Kubrick is another glaring omission from the Best Director winners list. He was overlooked for 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon and The Shining. But of course The Shining was overlooked: the Academy doesn’t do horror. Even when it’s horror starring Jack Nicholson.
Another genre, the western, was largely an Academy no-go zone during its golden era. John Ford’s The Searchers, starring John Wayne, is roundly considered the greatest western ever made and a big Oscar fail.
Musicals have fallen in and out of favour. The image of Gene Kelly swinging (and singin’) on a lamp post is indelibly imprinted on our collective movie memories, yet the best musical ever made, Singin’ in the Rain, couldn’t even win a Best Music Oscar.
The Wizard of Oz didn’t get its due either, but 1940 was admittedly a tough year: Gone with the Wind taking home gold against Oz, Goodbye Mr Chips, Wuthering Heights, Stage Coach and Mr Smith Goes to Washington.
The competition in 1977 was tough, too: Sylvester Stallone’s Rocky won the bout, but there has long been consternation as to whether Network (a satire on the future of television news that time would prove correct) or Taxi Driver (clearly a far too dangerous choice for the Academy) were more worthy contenders.
What about Rebel Without a Cause, the film that basically introduced the world to the concept of the “teenager”? Three nominations; none for James Dean; no wins.
With its literary pedigree, backdrop of war and mental instability, Apocalypse Now should be the type of film the Academy eats up. It lost to courtroom drama Kramer vs Kramer in 1980. While perhaps a worthy enough contender at the time, Kramer has not proven timeless like Francis Ford Coppola’s epic.
Raiders of the Lost Ark is another “shouldabeen champion”, yet it’s plain to see why the Academy went for a huge production like Chariots of Fire in 1982. Perhaps, as with Hitchcock’s canon, Indy’s rollicking adventure was just too much fun for its own good.
While the Academy and its voting membership has clearly had its quirks and prejudices over the years, the machinations behind their decisions would change with the coming of the 1990s and the birth of the “Oscar campaign”.
Harvey Weinstein, the co-founder of Miramax and current co-chairman of The Weinstein Company, was the pioneer of the campaigning which now seems as integral an Awards season component as red carpets, designer frocks and complaining about the host.
“In those days, the studios had a lock on the Oscars, because none of the indies campaigned aggressively,’’ Weinstein said in Peter Biskind’s book Down and Dirty Pictures.
“The only thing that we did to change the rules was, rather than just sitting it out and getting beat because somebody has more money, more power, more influence, we ran a guerilla campaign.”
In the two decades since, his guerilla campaigning has included setting up screenings at the Motion Picture Retirement Home (according to former publicist Mark Urman), old school cold-calling, having international actors and directors relocate to LA to gladhand voters at party after party, newspaper ads, email-outs, op-eds and, if you believe the whispers, spreading nasty rumours about rival nominees.
Miramax is estimated to have spent $5 million to ensure Shakespeare in Love, a fairly average rom-com, had enough Academy votes to beat rightful favourite Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture in 1998.
And surely that push gave Gwyneth Paltrow the necessary momentum to snatch the Best Actress Oscar from Cate Blanchett (Elizabeth) in the second great upset of the night.
Still, for all his Oscar season renown, Weinstein’s methods are not failsafe: He had Scorsese hit the hustings hard for the bloody Gangs of New York in 2003. It was nominated for 10 Oscars, including Best Picture, Director and Actor (Daniel Day-Lewis), but it failed to pick up a single statuette. Perhaps, once again, a case of Scorsese pushing his story beyond the Academy’s boundaries of acceptable taste.
It wasn’t campaigning that caused one of the biggest upsets in Oscar history, when Crash surprised even presenter Jack Nicholson by taking Best Picture over Brokeback Mountain in 2006. Prior to the Oscars, Brokeback had won pretty much every Best Film gong going.
After Nicholson announced the Oscar upset, he pulled a “what the?” face, captured for posterity on the telecast.
Following the 2006 Awards, Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan theorised that Crash won because it allowed voters to “feel like they were good, productive liberals” for backing a film about racial bias, while at the same time avoiding the discomfort of voting for a film about a love affair between two homosexual men.
An equally hard win to credit for many was Forrest Gump’s triumph over Pulp Fiction in 1995, though this travesty clearly falls into the Safe Crowd-Pleaser Over Controversial Groundbreaker bracket.
Adding insult to injury was the Academy’s decision to award Best Director to Gump’s Robert Zemeckis over Quentin Tarantino. (Over his career, the Academy has instead rewarded Tarantino with two statuettes in the less hot-button Best Screenplay category.)
It’s hard to imagine any similar outcries at the 2014 Oscars. If Gravity wins, some might say they preferred 12 Years a Slave or Nebraska or Dallas Buyers Club or American Hustle or Philomena ... but there’s no clear frontrunner just waiting to be robbed.
In fact, the biggest gasps would probably come if Scorsese’s mad, bad Wall Street Wolf bypassed the wowsers to get over the line.
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