newcritics

“I lost to a fucking actor. And then I lost to another fucking actor.”

Thus, according to the Siren’s source, did Martin Scorsese sum up his decade-bracketing Oscar nominations for Raging Bull and Goodfellas. When he lost the 2004 Oscar, the Siren could only think, oh no, a third actor–although watching Clint Eastwood climb to the podium surely must have stung a lot less than Kevin Costner. Actors form the largest voting group in the Academy, and perhaps that helps to explain why Scorsese keeps getting sucker-punched when the Best Director envelopes are opened.

Oh well, you might think, maybe he doesn’t care that much. Having your (unnominated) work on Taxi Driver and Mean Streets on the resume, in addition to the losses to the aforementioned fucking actors, is surely its own reward. You would, however, be wrong. According to almost everyone, Scorsese cares, and cares a lot. You don’t have to listen to gossip; you can see it on his face as he sits in the audience, and at other times, too. The year he presented an honorary Oscar to Stanley Donen, the Siren could swear there was a half-second on stage where Scorsese didn’t want to let go of the statue.

And who’s to argue that Scorsese is wrong to care? Most directors do. Charlie Chaplin, Alfred Hitchcock, Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini never won, but John Ford won four. For every head-scratcher, like Norman Taurog for Skippy (if you have seen that one, the Siren salutes you), there is another year when the Academy got it right. One year, they don’t even nominate Scorsese for his finest film, and hand the statuette to future nonentity John G. Avildsen for Rocky–also overlooking the directors of Network and All the President’s Men. The next year, the Academy goes for the actual talent and give the award to Woody Allen for the decade’s finest comedy, Annie Hall. (Allen, by the way, is one of the few who seems genuinely not to care–at least for now. We will see how he feels as time’s wing’d chariot threatens to run him over.)

Best Director, like all the Academy Awards, is essentially a popularity contest. But sometimes talent is its own form of popularity. Take the curmudgeonly John Ford, a hard man to like on a personal level. But his abilities were almost universally revered by his peers. If sometimes, as with his 1941 win for How Green Was My Valley, an award to Ford gave a chance to overlook an upstart like Orson Welles, that was just gravy. Years later, for 1952, the Academy could give Best Picture to the wince-inducingly awful The Greatest Show on Earth, but it was Ford who would walk away with the Oscar for directing The Quiet Man. “C.B., I don’t like you,” Ford famously told DeMille during a Directors Guild fracas over blacklist-era loyalty oaths. Hard not to conclude that the Academy felt the same way.

Howard Hawks, nominated only once, for 1941’s Sergeant York, lost to Ford and later claimed not to care, saying, “I listened to too many speeches of acceptance that would have made a good comedy.” Which is a nice quip, but Ford wasn’t above ribbing Hawks in later years about the loss, and according to his biographer, Hawks didn’t think it was funny. Joseph Mankiewicz, the focus of the celebrated Guild loyalty-oath dustup, felt positively resurrected when he got a late-career nomination for Sleuth. It didn’t matter that he had already won two years in a row, first for A Letter to Three Wives, then for All About Eve, no less–he was still exultant. “I’m as jealous of my ‘oldest whore’ theory as Andrew Sarris is of his auteur concept,” laughed Mankiewicz. “Suddenly you get hot, and the wrinkles go out of your face, and you are a young beauty again.”

The Academy does have a bad habit of honoring those who directed the films of the moment, from Cavalcade to Rocky to Kramer vs. Kramer to A Beautiful Mind, then trying to make up for the consequent oversights with honorary awards that are too little and damn near too late. Yet the directors still crave this evidence of the regard of their peers. The clip of the elderly Charlie Chaplin accepting his shamefully overdue honorary award in 1972 can still bring the Siren to tears, as can the picture of never-nominated Satyajit Ray, clutching his Oscar as he lay, quite literally, on his deathbed. Robert Altman, celebrated for his mordant observations on Hollywood, still looked overjoyed accepting his award. Hard to believe that was only last year, and that we have lost him since. There was even the controversial honorary award to Elia Kazan, who had already won twice in competition. No matter how you felt about the decisions he made in his life, it was hard not to feel pity for this talented man as he climbed the stage, his face registering both gratitude and fear of being booed.

So Scorsese cares, and damn it, so does the Siren. She wants him to win. The Departed does not represent his best work, but even off-brand Scorsese is better than many others’ best. If his work on this year’s film isn’t quite up to Goodfellas, well, you could say that about all the nominated directors. Let Marty win one in competition. Don’t make him wait for an honorary Oscar twenty years from now, voted to him as the Academy keeps one eye on his medical chart.

If fate turns cruel, and Scorsese loses once more, the Siren thinks he’s entitled to a bit of chagrin. Nothing he is likely to do would equal Billy Wilder’s display of pique in 1945. Somehow Wilder, who should have known better, convinced himself he had a sporting chance of winning for the previous year’s supremely dark, cynical Double Indemnity. No way, as Otto Friedrich wrote in City of Nets:

When Wilder went to Grauman’s for the Academy Award ceremonies the following spring, he hoped and expected to win an Oscar even though he knew that Paramount had been pushing Leo McCarey’s saccharine Going My Way, which was in fact voted best picture of the year. When McCarey was also named best director, though, Wilder could not bear it. As McCarey proudly marched down the aisle of Grauman’s to receive his award, Wilder stuck out a foot and tripped him.

Nil desperandum, Mr. Scorsese. Wilder won the next year, for The Lost Weekend.