leonardo DiCaprio has won an Oscar nomination yet again. As the talk around him never getting an Oscar heightens, PRAKRITI ROY looks at the competition staring him this year
Now that leonardo DiCaprio has been nominated for an Oscar yet again — for the fifth time to be precise — there is a buzz around the annual show. Will heIJ Won’t heIJ If ever he willIJ Such questions are crowding social network sites with no clear answers as the competition is tough, especially in the Best Actor category.
To start with, Eddie Redmayne is back again after his Theory of Everything, this time playing the complex character of a man trapped in a woman’s body way back in the 1920s in a moving love story The Danish Girl. Then there is Matt Damon as and in The Martian and Michael Fassbender as Steve Jobs.
DiCaprio came closest to holding the golden lady when he performed a gritty role in the Aviator in 2005 but fell to the histrionics of Jamie Foxx in Ray.
Such has been the anticipation around this classy and much deserving actor’s prospects at the Oscars that some have compared it to waiting for Godot.
DiCaprio has won 39 awards from 153 nominations, and been named runner-up for four of those nominations. He has been nominated for five Academy Awards, 11 Golden Globe Awards, winning three, nine Teen Choice Awards with two wins, and nine Screen Actor Guild Awards — but he is yet to get an Oscar.
Even as the DiCaprio plight gets centrestage, his film has the distinction of rubbing shoulders with movies with maximum nominations down the years. In the 88-year-old history of the Oscars, there have been some films that have stood out, and for all the right reasons. They have a record number of wins as well as nominations.
Titanic, Ben-Hur and The lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (lOTR) each won 11 awards and they had 14, 12 and 11 nominations, respectively. This means thatlOTR is a movie that has won an award in each of the categories nominated in. Can any of the movies this year beat that recordIJ
This year, DiCaprio’s The Revenant has got the maximum number of nominations, 12. These include Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director and Best Supporting Actor. Post apocalyptic tale Mad Max: Fury Road is trailing very closely with 10 nominations which include Best Picture, Best Director and Best Editing.
With those many nominations, the competition between the two films is quite fierce. And, the favourite question related to the Oscars still remains — Will leonardo DiCaprio finally win an OscarIJ Although DiCaprio’s performance in The Revenant has got him a lot of accolades and even a Golden Globe, the competition for the Best Actor Oscar is a tough one.
As for the Best Picture category, the Academy has nominated eight movies this year, making the competition harder.
The nominations are, meanwhile, being slammed as being "too White" for having only White actors in leading categories. This is the second year in a row that no Black actor has been nominated although people were expecting the nominations from sports drama Creed and the film on Hip-Hop culture, Straight Outta Compton.
THE INDIAN PRESENCE
Marathi film Court (2014) was India's official entry to the Oscars this year, while Kannada film Care of Footpath 2 made a lateral entry. However, both did not make it to the nomination list for Best Foreign Film. On the flip side, the Indian presence at the Oscars this year will be through two directors of Indian origin staying abroad. Indo-British director Asif Kapadia's documentary Amy, based on the life of singer Amy Winehouse, has received a nomination in the Best Documentary Feature category. Indian-American Sanjay Patel has bagged a nomination in the Best Animated Short Film category for Sanjay’s Super Team.