Never won a Directing Oscar: Kubrick, Hitchcock, Godard, Welles, Kurosawa, Lynch, PTA, Chaplin, Tarantino, Cronenberg, Malick, Fellini, Bergman, Varda, Leone, Fincher, Altman, Hawks, Lumet, Herzog, Scott, Gilliam, Preminger, Cassavetes, Lang— It’s all meaningless, folks.
And yet, in recent years, Martin Scorsese has made it no secret that he would have liked to have won more statuettes. As it stands, Scorsese has that lone Best Director win for 2006’s “The Departed.” Looking at the nominees from that year (Inarritu, Greengrass, Eastwood, Frears) and, yeah, he deserved the Oscar that night.
However, in his illustrious career, Scorsese has directed a handful of better films than “The Departed”. His go-to editor, the legendary Thelma Schoonmaker, told Esquire that he should have won “at least seven” times! Scorsese has 11 nominations to his name. His last four films combined for 24 nominations and won zero Oscars.
There are two big WTF Oscar losses for Scorsese. Firstly, for 1980’s “Raging Bull” which lost Picture and Director to “Ordinary People” and Robert Redford. Then there’s Scorsese again losing to an actor-turned-director in 1991 — “Goodfellas” and Scorsese were beaten by Kevin Costner’s “Dances With Wolves. Another time Scorsese should have won was for 1976’s “Taxi Driver,” but he didn’t even get nominated for that film. Go figure.
He also wasn’t nominated for “Casino,” “King of Comedy,” “After Hours,” “Mean Streets,” and “The Age of Innocence.”
Scorsese’s direction in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” even if you were underwhelmed by the film, and, yes, it is a flawed (but brilliant) one, was total tour-de-force filmmaking. He balanced this vast and ambitious story with incredibly effortless abandon. This was obviously Christopher Nolan’s year, and there was no way Scorsese was going to pull off the upset.
Forget about ‘Killers,’ Scorsese has definitely been taken for granted by Academy, which is, and never was, a litmus test for quality. Maybe he’ll have better luck with his next film — which might be an 80-minute ode to Jesus or “The Wager,” starring Leonardo DiCaprio.
