No love for Leo

I haven’t acted since I was tricked in to starring in a school play 4 years ago. I forgot my lines and gave a performance only a mother could love. Leonardo DiCaprio is considered to be one of the finest actors of his generation. Yet despite my wooden acting, I have won the same number of Oscars as Leo.

Leonardo has earned his fourth Oscar nomination this year for his role in The Wolf of Wall Street– a collaboration with Leo fan boy Martin Scorsese– and the internet has gone wild with anticipation (it doesn’t take much). Could this be Leo’s year? Although we all like to hope that the star will finally carry away a statuette, the Academy have been far from kind to him in the past.

Leo’s career got off to a good start with an Oscar nod at just 19 years old, but things quickly went down hill. He has been nominated for 10 Golden Globes and only 4 Oscars. I’m not great at maths, but that seems like a big difference. Even his role in The Departed– one of the best films ever- was ignored. Yes, the Golden Globes are the slightly less prestigious cousin to the Academy Awards, but the snubbed performances were just as good as his Golden Globe nominated roles (sometimes better).

Adding insult to injury, his co-stars are regularly honoured while he is left weeping in the corner. Meryl Streep 2.0 Kate Winslet (Titanic), Christopher Walken (Catch Me if You Can), Mark Wahlberg (The Departed), Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road) and Christoph Waltz (Django Unchained) were all nominated for films in which Leo delivered his finest performances. In my humble opinion- which is always right- Leo gave a better performance than winner Waltz and he wasn’t even nominated.

The problem is that the voters in the Academy don’t know all that much. They are mostly older, white males who vote based on the buzz they hear because they haven’t actually seen half of the films. As a result many of the finest actors are overlooked, such as the late Peter O’Toole who was nominated eight times without a win. Despite Leo giving one of his finest performances this year, he could still go the way of O’Toole and pass away before hitting the Holy Grail.

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It’s clear that DiCaprio really wants it. His Golden Globe acceptance speech was passionate and had probably been years in the making. Unfortunately, that might be his down fall. Clearly he is going to spend the rest of his life making Oscar bait films, and so the Academy feel they can push him aside in favour of those who might not get another chance. Perhaps he should take a leaf out of 2 time winner Daniel Day-Lewis’s book: stop acting for years at a time so that when you finally get around to making a film the voters have to reward you.

In the mean time, he can comfort himself with lingerie models and piles of cash. It must be hard to be Leo.

Image courtesy of andpop.com and whyworldwhy.com