Always one to pursue useless knowledge wherever he can find it in a seemingly never-ending quest to achieve the improbable and downright unlikely status of modern-day Renaissance man, Mark Bittmann has indulged his desire to never be lost in any conversation, by developing an arcane understanding of things of little consequence or import while maintaining his alleged status as a small fish in a small pond.
As long as his self-indulgent whim is catered to, he manages to sustain the facade of someone under the misperception that others care about what he thinks. With a ubiquity normally reserved for greenhouse gasses, he chases his random and inconsequential thoughts with all the tenacity of a banana peel. This is his life, his curse, and his twisted and maniacal way of impressing the ladies.
Martin Scorsese didn’t win the Academy Award for best director…again?!?
Good.
A whole lot of ink had recently been spilled regarding the recent Academy Awards, accompanied by many predictions that Martin Scorsese would finally receive a coveted golden statue symbolizing the achievement of having been considered the best director of the year by the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The general flavor of the opinions offered up in favor of his winning usually contained the statement that he is America’s greatest living film director. Obviously they had been waiting for Billy Wilder to meet his maker before being so bold as to pass the designation to Scorsese. You’ll notice that they limited the scope of the compliment to residents of the United States as well. Not exactly a backhanded compliment, but not an all-encompassing one either. Whenever anyone asked my opinion of the Best Director Oscar race this year, I told them that I wanted “anyone but Scorsese” to win. Why? Because, despite the fact that he is one of my all-time favorite directors, Gang’s of New York didn’t deserve the nomination. When one considers his past work and work that he is presumably still capable of, Gangs of New York played like wannabe Scorsese more than as an original vision of the man himself. It was, to say the least, unimpressive relative to his earlier films.
Now, while I feel that Mr. Scorsese has been the mastermind behind such original and thought-provoking and varied achievements as Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, After Hours, Goodfellas and The Age of Innocence, to name a few, he has, like Stanley Kubrick, proven himself capable of making utter crap as well as displaying a genius for cinematic storytelling and, frankly, hasn’t made a film worthy of his talent in ten years. Casino seemed to suffer from unintentional self-parody and may as well have carried the title Goodfellas II, considering many of the same actors populate both films. (Joe Pesci is very engaging, but he isn’t what one would refer to as particularly “rangy”. Not exactly a chameleon, Pesci…but I digress.) I mean, he did make Kundun after all and it was Godawful. The Last Temptation of Christ, his other foray into spiritual matters, wasn’t a whole lot better and seemed to suffer from a misapplication of his own obsessions into the narratives’. It just didn’t seem to work as anything but a personal statement that spoke to the failed seminary student who directed it. Bringing Out the Dead, despite being a re-teaming with Taxi Driver scribe Paul Schrader was just silly and felt like a contrived, false drama that required Scorsese to resort to mere flash for the sake of flash to convey it’s hipness. Not an impressive work at all, especially when one considers the creators involved. It featured more than an able cast who, through no fault of their own, weren’t able to convince me that their sometimes harrowing feelings of detachment and life of playing witness to that which many lack the mettle to endure was all that interesting. Seems like it should have been. As for Gangs of New York…let’s just say I didn’t find it deserving of any nominations, except for Daniel Day Lewis’s performance. He was incredible. Not a trace of the 21st century Irishman who played the part was to be found onscreen. I was in awe of him. Few living film actors are as immersive in their roles as he. He was that good. It’s the rest of the film that was awash in over-the-top visual and narrative silliness. The sets looked like sets and the costumes like Ringling Bros. tailored them. Not to mention the fact that Leonardo DiCaprio is far too pretty and possessed of good dentistry to convincingly portray a street tough of the time. Ditto for Cameron Diaz. I wanted the man who made Taxi Driver to show us the mean streets of 19th century New York and the story he was trying to tell ended up mired in authenticity for the sake of authenticity instead of a means to establish a convincing backdrop. Of course, that’s just my opinion, unhumble as usual.
So, if “America’s greatest living director” were truly at the top of his game, I would think Gangs of New York would have fared better at the box office and with the film intelligentsia. As is, it is an also-ran in an otherwise impressive oeuvre, his Eyes Wide Shut if you will, which was a terrible film that, incidentally, Scorsese himself referred to as one of the best of 1999…and he wasn’t joking.
The thing is, many a critic or movie journalist seems to think that he deserved the Oscar for best director of Gangs of New York, simply because he earned it so many times in the past and was, in hindsight, royally screwed…and not just once. He wasn’t even nominated for Taxi Driver. He lost the Oscar to Robert Redford (occasionally no slouch himself behind the camera, but hardly the visionary Scorsese was at the time) the year Raging Bull faced off with Ordinary People and ceded the Best Picture Oscar as well to Redford’s wrenching family drama. It was the first Best Director Oscar loss to a first-timer that he would suffer, the most criminal of which being a loss to Kevin Costner (who practically negated his achievement with The Postman) who cleaned up with the Oscar-bait Dances With Wolves, despite the fact that the film’s most talked-about scene, the buffalo hunt, was shot and overseen by 3-time collaborator (Fandango, Waterworld, and the insufferable Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves) director Kevin Reynolds, who received a special thanks credit for his efforts. Never mind that we’ve seen “one man’s self-awakening” films a million times before, from Lawrence of Arabia to Edward Scissorhands, the academy traditionally rewards epic motion pictures over smaller and more personal fare. The academy is composed primarily of old fogies who look to the past for their critical reference and films like Goodfellas and Taxi Driver aren’t exactly universal entertainments. In my opinion, Costner will likely never make another great film from behind the camera and his win was merely an anomaly in what will likely prove to be a hit and miss career as a director, like Clint Eastwood. The main difference being that Eastwood has hit more than he’s missed and thus far Costner is batting only .500. Maybe I’m a little quick to judge, but Kevin Costner’s name has never collided in the same sentence as “visionary”, outside of tribute (read: female) fan sites on the Net.
So Scorsese got pooched by the academy a couple of times. Big deal. There are many others every bit as deserving that would welcome him to the club. And an exclusive club it is too. Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick all belong, as do Charlie Chaplin, Howard Hawks and Akira Kurosawa, so it’s not like Scorsese is in undistinguished company. Besides, would he really want to win an Oscar for a lesser work like Gangs of New York? It was shameless enough when Paul Newman received a courtesy Oscar for the second time he played Fast Eddie Felson, more a tribute to his career than his performance in The Color of Money, which, coincidentally, was directed by none other than gun-for-hire Martin Scorsese. If a director with a body of work the caliber of Scorsese’s prior to his recent disappointments were to receive an Oscar for a mediocre effort, it would be just as empty as other specious selections of the past. If I were he, I’d feel like an asterisk had been placed next to my name in the annals of film history. A filmography that implies that his best work was overlooked, but he was thrown a bone later in his career would seem like a cheapening of the honor. Not that the Oscar’s are all that great a shakes, but it was important enough to him that he felt he needed to campaign for one. Isn’t it the purpose of lifetime achievement awards to make up for such slights? Wouldn’t he consider it honor enough to have earned not only a special award, but the retrospective tribute that comes with it, a collage of scenes of his work that add up to an impressive body of work as it stands, whether or not his gifts have failed him as of late? That way he would go out with a bang, instead of just fading into old age as the greatest living American director never to win an Oscar. Then again, who says he isn’t still capable of making a great film again. Talent like his doesn’t stay in a slump and many a great director made their best work later in life, so there’s still plenty of time for him to win it outright. Here’s hoping he does some day.
