Although we all know DiCaprio deserved to win an Oscar, he won it for the wrong movie.
He finally did it ladies and gents. Leonardo friggin' DiCaprio got his gold. The Internet blew up, and the reaction to the news has been the same: it’s about time.
Now that DiCaprio has won, should the public really care that the Academy finally got its act together?
Here are some reasons why his Oscar for Best Actor in the performance of The Revenant does not truly validate DiCaprio’s successful acting career.
Most would agree that The Revenant, for all its amazing qualities, was not DiCaprio’s best performance. On one hand, he did go to new extremes by filming in remote locations and immersing himself deeply into his role. On the other hand, his part in the overall scheme in the story was less colorful than we are used to seeing.
It’s not necessarily his fault. The role he had restricted him to crawling and groaning inaudibly for a large chunk of the movie. He crawled and groaned with the best of them, but he could only do so much. So while The Revenant overall was a terrific movie — three Oscars for 2016 — it wasn’t completely because of Leo.
So why is it that he won an award for that movie out of all of them? It’s because he deserved the Oscar, but he didn’t deserve it because of this film.
He deserved it for The Departed, for The Wolf of Wall Street and a handful of other movies you could debate about. In other words, he was “due” an Oscar.
Al Pacino is another example. His performance in the The Godfather and Serpico were both brilliant. While he was nominated for the Best Actor category for both of those films, he lost out. However, he did win one for Scent of a Woman, a movie in which he performs with half the vigor and less than half of the intensity than either of the other two movies.
But he won an Oscar for it. Because he was “due” one. It’s hard to argue against the fact that DiCaprio should have won an Oscar long ago, and he is was in the same position as Pacino.
As the lack of racial diversity in the Academy has shown us, the Oscars are out of touch. Actors that deserve to win don’t always win. So why should we care what movie it thinks deserves its little gold man? We shouldn’t.
{{tncms-asset app="editorial" id="c911e702-c233-11e4-a193-fbfe4a1e402b"}}
He was spine-chillingly calm in the face of a murderous mob boss in The Departed and embraced drug-fueled madness in The Wolf of Wall Street. He made us all question what was real in Inception and kept us guessing in Catch Me If You Can. We don’t need an Oscar to tell us that those roles were brilliant.
We shouldn’t care he finally got what he “deserved.” Dan Marino never won a Superbowl title, but nobody will ever accuse him of being a bad quarterback. Like Marino, DiCaprio will be remembered as one of the greats, regardless of his statuette.
@AustinRErickson
