Oscar Week: When the Academy is wrong. Part Two.

4. Once upon a time there was an actor with a crazy Italian name. He was nominated in 1994 for Best Supporting Actor because he played an autistic kid really well. He spent the next 11 years staring in both artistic and mainstream movies becoming one of the most popular actors in American cinema. Despite playing at least four characters that nobody would even bat an eyelash at if they were nominated, Leonardo DiCaprio was shut out entirely. In 2005 he was finally recognized for his role as Howard Hughes in The Aviator. All seemed to be right with the Academy again. The film was directed by Martin Scorcese and had all of the hype heading into Oscar night. Much like his director, the Academy had again shunned DiCaprio. They instead decided that Jamie Foxx's portrayal of Ray Charles in Ray was the more worthy performance. Not to take anything away from Foxx, he was fantastic, but seriously? One of the more annoying flaws in the Academy is they always feel the need to reward for the past and assume that young actors will have plenty more films to get nominated for in the future. As Martin Scorcese can prove (until he finally won the next year he for The Departed), that is not always the case. Sometimes they decide to make a wrong choice just for the sake of making a wrong choice. I might not be writing this if the award went to Clint Eastwood for Million Dollar Baby. While I wouldn't agree with it, I understand that the Academy was swept up with the movie and it won four of the major six awards that season. Instead they overlooked one of the finest acting performances I have ever witnessed for a very good one. DiCaprio is able to make you feel, if not understand, Hughes uneasiness and eccentric nature over the span of decades. Towards the end of the film DiCaprio is stuck staring at a bathroom door handle that he is too afraid to touch because of his obsessive compulsive disorder and the audience has no choice but to question what options he has. There are germs everywhere and he is stuck in what must be the worst place in the world to be stuck. Cate Blanchett did win an acting award for playing Katherine Hepburn in the film, but it's hard to imagine her performance without DiCaprio on the other side of the screen. This is one of the rare times the Golden Globes were correct by giving him the award. Even more concerning is the idea that since this performance DiCaprio gained one nomination for the overrated Blood Diamond and nothing else. Not Inception. not J. Edgar. not The Departed, and most mystifyingly not for his finest performance from a film I mentioned in the previous post, Revolutionary Road. The man can't catch a break and that is why his omission for The Aviator is the fourth biggest mistake of the Oscars in the past 20 years.