I will legally change my name to Jack Dawson if Leo doesn’t win an Oscar this weekend

This is not a joke


Did you see The Revenant? I mean, did you see The Revenant? Did you see what Leo did to himself – lost , beaten, hairy, dirty, buried, harried, hunted, haunted? Leo eating raw bison liver. Have you seen a bison? Leo getting the shit, the snot, the guts, knocked out of him by a bear. Leo cutting open a literal horse with a literal knife and literally pulling out the steaming innards with his gnarly leper hands. Why?

Because he needed somewhere to sleep. 

Leonardo DiCaprio took a thousand punches in the face to bring you that movie and to deliver himself an Oscar. He deserves that Oscar. There is nobody, nobody more worthy of a small gold statue and a large night out than that man. Everyone feels the same way.

We have all followed Leo. We don’t change the channel when those films come on. Romeo + Juliet, The Aviator, Shutter Island, Revolutionary Road, The Wolf of Wall Street, Blood Diamond, Gangs of New York, Django Unchained… I mean, what can you say? He’s an idol. He’s our idol.

And as I watched our idol, four times nominated for an Oscar, never a winner, and now nominated for a fifth, I realised two things.

One: Leo does not lack The Wound. He has suffered and bled for his art.

Two: If he doesn’t win this time – the time he deserves it more than any other times previously – I will have to do something drastic, as drastic as The Revenant, to show solidarity with him. And then it struck me.

If Leo doesn’t win the Oscar this weekend, I will legally change my name to Jack Dawson. 

I am a 22-year-old university educated male

Why Jack Dawson? Because that’s the move, the moment, when Leo went from some guy in a film called Gilbert Grape or whatever, to a supernova, to the man Buzzfeed once described as “an entire generation’s sexual awakening”.

Maybe if I change my name to Jack Dawson I’ll become a better person. Maybe I’ll take up life drawing, maybe I’ll teach dates to spit over the side of big, stupid ships, maybe I’ll be a rogue, a gambler, a guy who out-chats high society chaps at dinner and dances on the tables after dessert. Maybe, dare I say it, I’ll be the king of the motherfucking world.

I don’t want this to happen. I want Leo to win the Oscar, I want everything to be OK.

But life isn’t like that, it isn’t always fair. Sometimes with life, you end up clinging to a door in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, slowly sinking into the freezing water and no one, not even the woman who loves you, can help. And sometimes a massive bear just straight fucks up your day. Leo knows.

I’m ready to do this. I’ve done my research. The legal papers will be with me by the weekend.

This is real life, this is not a drill

If Leo doesn’t win on Sunday night, I plan on losing with him.