Will poor Leo’s moment ever come?
In the words of everyone on the Internet right now: poor Leo. The 86th Academy Awards marked the 20th anniversary of Leonardo DiCaprio’s first Oscar nomination, and it was also the fourth ceremony from which he went home empty-handed.
DiCaprio’s continuing inability to land an Oscar, despite being one of the most feted and bankable actors in the business, is a quirk of the awards-season ecosystem; a kind of strange and mystical natural phenomenon, like the moving rocks of Death Valley.
When you examine his near misses one by one, they look like exactly that — close shaves, in which another performance just happened to garner more support — although DiCaprio himself must surely now be wondering if he should be taking all this personally.
In 1994, he was nominated for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape in the best supporting actor category but lost to Tommy Lee Jones, for his work in The Fugitive. In 2005, he made the jump to best actor for playing Howard Hughes in Martin Scorsese’s The Aviator, but lost to Jamie Foxx in Ray.
Two years later, in 2007, he was back on the best actor list for Blood Diamond, but voters preferred Forest Whitaker, playing Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland. This year he was nominated for another Scorsese picture, The Wolf of Wall Street, which many critics have described as the best role of his career. Yet he lost again — this time to Matthew McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club.
There’s an argument, flattering but also compelling given the reported outrage at Wolf of Wall Street Academy screenings, that DiCaprio might have just been too convincing as the gangsterish stockbroker Jordan Belfort to have a realistic chance of winning an Oscar for it.
Could the character’s breezy lack of contrition have turned off voters who would have liked to see this corrupted American dreamer get his comeuppance? Maybe so.
His pep-talks to his minions on the shop floor of Stratton Oakmont, Belfort’s brokerage firm, certainly felt like Academy Award-winning stuff as you watched them. But Scorsese’s film denies us an easy moral escape route when things go sour, and as you leave the cinema, after having seen Belfort reinvent himself as a public speaker, his mantras — “pick up the phone and start dialing,” “I want you to deal with your problems by becoming rich” — are still jangling uncomfortably in your ears.
But all hope for a DiCaprio Oscar win might not be lost quite yet. Paul Newman — like DiCaprio, a likable, versatile, handsome, classically charismatic leading man — was nominated seven times between 1959 and 1983 without ever making it to the podium. He received an honorary trophy in 1986 before going on to win best actor outright the following year, for his work in The Color of Money.
And Al Pacino, who was first nominated in 1973 for The Godfather, had to wait for two decades, and seven further nominations, to pass until The Scent of a Woman clinched it for him in 1993.
Since the Gilbert Grape days, Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet and most crucially Titanic, we’ve watched DiCaprio grow older on screen and develop his craft to the point at which we think we know him too well — where even roles like Belfort and the grotesque plantation owner Calvin Candie in Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained aren’t enough to truly surprise us or spur his contemporaries into thinking, “Yes, this is it, this is the one he’ll get it for.”
The Academy has a long memory and a weakness for a satisfying plot arc. Poor Leo will have his moment soon enough.