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By Other Voices voices@moviecitynews.com

Oscar 2004: Scorsese’s Year?

Yes, No, Maybe

With The Aviator, his extremely entertaining bio-picture about the young Howard Hughes, Martin Scorsese emerges as a frontrunner in this year’s Oscar race. Aviator raises a number of interesting questions regarding Scorsese’s Oscar prospects. Will Scorsese win the Oscar at his fifth nomination? And how high will Aviator fly with the Academy voters?

Five nominations is a very particular number in Oscar’s annals. There is small group of directors who have been nominated five times but never won, including the late Hitchcock, King Vidor, Clarence Brown, and the very much alive and kicking Robert Altman, whose latest nod was for Gosford Park, in 2001.

There are two scenarios here. First, Scorsese will follow in the footsteps of George Cukor, who won Best Director at his fifth nomination, for My Fair Lady, in 1964 at age 65. If that happens, Scorsese, who just turned 62, would be one of the oldest Oscar winners. According to my book, All About Oscar, most filmmakers win the Oscar while in their 40s.

But Scorsese also runs the risk of becoming the Hitchcock of his generation, a brilliant filmmaker with multiple nominations but without the Academy seal of approval. Like Hitchcock, whose film Suspicionwas nominated for Best Picture but he was not, one of Scorsese’s films, Taxi Driver, was Oscar-nominated but he was snubbed. And, also like Hitchcock, Scorsese received a directing nomination,The Last Temptation of Christ, for a film that was not nominated.

Throughout his career, Hitchcock suffered from the “debased” status of his specialized genre, the suspense thriller. While more versatile than Hitchcock, and working in different genres, Scorsese’s consistent thematic turf — the tough, brutally violent macho gangster milieu –might have worked against him vis-a-vis the Academy’s conservative taste. Besides, Scorsese might have exhausted the thematic, stylistic, and even lyrical possibilities of gangster life, explored in at least a dozen films.

As to how high Aviator will fly with the Academy, again two scenarios. The movie could fly as wild and high as its visionary hero and nab 10 to 14 nominations. Or it could follow a bumpier road, with mid-range numbers of 5 to 9. Either way, Aviator is a shoe-in for Best Picture and Director nomination.

The crucial variables for how big a sweep Aviator will have are: Strong critical attention, positive word-of-mouth, Miramax’s marketing muscle-and luck. Yes, sheer luck. Aviatorshould benefit from the lack of strong competition in the Best Picture category in a year that’s good but not great for American movies. With Alexander, Spanglish, and The Life Aquatic, all serious contenders just weeks ago but now out of the big league, the threats to Aviator are posed by Finding Neverland (ironically, another Miramax title),Phantom of the Opera, Kinsey, Million Dollar Baby, and to a lesser extent, Closer, which is sharply dividing critics.

Tough Luck, Bad Timing or The Message’s The Thing

Does anyone remember today the artistic merits of Ordinary People, which swept the 1980 Oscars, beating out Raging Bull, arguably Scorsese’s finest film? Raging Bullbrilliantly recreated the fractured life of boxing champ Jake La Motta, who rose from squalor to the pinnacle of his brutal career only to be destroyed by his own paranoia. Scorsese chose black and white cinematography to render stark realism, brutal vigor, and psychological intensity to the story. Of all of Scorsese’s psychodramas, Raging Bull is the most intense and unyielding. The picture was so graphic in its slow-motion depiction of battering in the ring that viewers charged the film with both sadism and masochism.

In contrast, Ordinary People was a middlebrow family melodrama that, though well-acted, didn’t begin approach the brilliance of Raging Bull. Despite the fact that the family in Ordinary Peoplewas torn by tensions (a mother who unjustly blames her younger son for causing the death of her older, favorite son), ultimately the story’s therapeutic sensibility and the bonding of father and son preached for the right, positive family values and made these ordinary people easier to digest. To add insult to injury, it was the feature directorial debut ofRobert Redford, until then known only as a movie star.

Tough luck was also the crucial variable when the Academy snubbed GoodFellas and honoredDances With Wolves, Kevin Costner’s epic ode to a West long gone, with seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Director. The success of Dances With Wolves, Costner’s first feature, made him Hollywood’s new Golden Boy, and his film the first Western to win the Oscar since Cimarron in 1933. Scorsese’s crime-gangster GoodFellas, which swept all the critics awards (L.A., N.Y., National Society) was a better picture but, like Raging Bull, it didn’t have the reassuring, positive message that Costner’s film had.

The subtext of Scorsese versus Costner competition was fascinating. Thee great divide in 1990 seemed to have been based as much on social geography as on cinematic sensibility. A New Yorker at heart, and graduate of NYU, Scorsese has set most of his films in New York. GoodFellas was like New York City–sharp, tough, and bloody. In contrast, Costner hailed from California, and Dances With Wolves was a romantic epic about The West.
Consensus held that GoodFellas was brilliantly crafted but the gore and blood turned off the average Academy voters, who are older, more conservative, and mostly live in Los Angeles.

Then came the shocking snub of Gangs of New York, which was nominated for 10 Oscars and lost each one of them. On Oscar night, Gangs was upstaged twice: First byChicago, which grabbed Best Picture, and then by Polanski, the dark horse, nabbing Best Director for The Pianist.

Scorsese’s Career in Perspective

Bold, inventive, and uncompromising, Scorsese is arguably the most brilliant filmmaker working in cinema today. But despite his enormous prestige, Scorsese has never become an integral part of the Hollywood establishment. Some hold that this may be the reason he has never won the Oscar. Often rooted in his personal experience, exploring the Italian-American Catholic heritage, Scorsese’s films have tackled the themes of sin and redemption in a fiercely contemporary yet universally resonant fashion.

Scorsese has earned critical kudos that has made him the envy of many of his peers — critics selectedRaging Bull as the best film of the decade — but he craves larger public success. Scorsese is the only member of the film school generation (Spielberg, De Palma, Coppola, Lucas), who has never enjoyed a box-office blockbuster of the caliber of The Godfather, Star Wars, Mission Impossible, or E.T.None of Scorsese’s pictures has yet crossed the $100 million mark. His biggest hits, Cape Fear andGangs of New York, have each grossed around $70-$80 million, domestically.

Scorsese has worked largely outside the traditional Hollywood establishment. But even while working within the studio system, he has never been a product of it. He’s proto-independent, modeling his career after European auteurs of the 1960s, like Fellini and Bertolucci.

Moreover, Scorsese has been lucky to raise Hollywood money, yet still keep artistic control over his films. He has attained the goal of authorship more fully than any of his peers by consistently maintaining the quality of art at the expense of commercial viability. The lush, exquisitely detailed, chilly adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence (1993) is a paradigm of Scorsese as auteur, at once extravagant and academic, brilliant and detached, a film that dazzles the eyes but doesn’t stir the heart.

However, with box-office flops like King of Comedy and Kundun (both brilliant films), Scorsese began to lose his footing in The New Hollywood, which has only increased his anxiety to be popular and affected his choice of material, not always for the better.

Though overall a better picture than Gangs of New York, The Aviator doesn’t represent Scorsese’s best filmmaking. That honor still belongs to his New York trilogy: Mean Streets in 1973, Taxi Driver in 1976, and Raging Bull in 1980. Scorsese has tried and tried before, but up until Aviator he hasn’t succeeded in making accessible pictures for the mass audience. The Aviator signals something new in Scorsese’s long career: His ability to make a commercial picture, a movie that plays. The Aviator is Scorsese vying for the mainstream-call it Scorsese goes Hollywood.

The Aviator as Turning Point

The following factors show why The Aviator represents a point of departure for Scorsese:

* It is a sprawling, uniquely American saga, it has scope rather than depth, covering two crucial decades in American history.

* It is plot-driven, unlike Mean Streets or Raging Bull, where the emphasis was on character development rather than story. Mean Streets, (my favorite Scorsese film) was a character study of a small-time hood wracked by Catholic guilt. Taxi Driver offered a disturbing portrait of the seedy side of city life through the personality and encounters of a psychotic Vietnam vet cabbie.

* It is dramatically shapely: Unlike many of Scorsese’s films, it doesn’t deal in ambiguity.

* It is an easy movie to watch, one that goes down smoothly like whiskey. Audiences don’t have to work too hard.

* It is a much warmer film than, say, The King of Comedy or Kundun. It lacks the detached coldness that has characterized most of Scorsese’s work.

* It displays the same bravura techincal filmmaking we have come to expect from Scorsese. A triumphant piece of filmmaking, The Aviator is presented with gusto, from its gloriously whirling cameras to its freeze-frames and its jump cuts.Nearly every frame of this 166-minute-picture is vivid and exuberating.

* It has the juicy trashiness that comes with rich biographical material, unlike Raging Bull andGoodFellas.

* It is a classically structured rise and fall and rise tale of Howard Hughes as an American icon. As accomplished as GoodFellas was, it had no arc and no climax.

* Its color palette is bright and its hero, Hughes, is accessible and likable even when he descends into madness. In contrast, Raging Bull was starkly filmed in black-and-white and its anti-hero, Jake La Motta, was an icon of brutishness, placed in a harsh tragedy.

* It is not at heart, despite elements of alienation, paranoia, and madness, a controversial film. As screen hero, Hughes is not nearly as edgy, deviant, or problematic as Travis Bickle or La Motta.

* It is, by Scorsese’s standards, pretty mainstream. His most commercial films have been generic and more conventional, as with Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, his only film with a female protagonist and female point of view, or The Color of Money (1986), a finely crafted sequel to The Hustler, with a star performance from Paul Newman. Scorsese also scored popular success with Cape Fear (1991), a graphically violent, blood chilling genre item, a remake of the 1962 noir thriller.

What Martin Scorsese needs now is acceptance by the Academy — and the American public at large.

December 7, 2004
E-mail Emanuel Levy


Visit www.EmanuelLevy.com
Updated twice weekly, the site features five regular columns: Current Reviews, Oscar Alert (of films and performances), Film Commentary (on timely and relevant issues), DVD of the Week (both classic and new), and Festivals/Events (such as essays on Brando’s career and this year’s centennial celebration of George Stevens and Cary Grant).

Samuel Butler once observed that, “Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself.” About Emanuel Levy …

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

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There would be no Blade Runner if there was no Ray Bradbury. I couldn’t find Philip K. Dick. His agent didn’t even know where he was. And so I gave up.

I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

But then I did, and then I realized who it was, and I thought, “Wait, he’s in that realm, maybe he knows Philip K. Dick.” I said, “You know a guy named—” “Yeah, sure — you want his phone number?”

My friend paid my rent for a year while I wrote, because it turned out we couldn’t get a writer. My friends kept on me about, well, if you can’t get a writer, then you write.”
~ Hampton Fancher

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~ David Simon