THE OSCARS
Poetry in his victory
SAMANTH SUBRAMANIAN
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The Best Director Oscar for Martin Scorsese may only be a token of returned affection but it's a token everybody wanted him to get.
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If influence has anything to do with it, Scorsese has won his Oscar many times over.
Photos: AP and AFP
Hard, violent and GRITTY: Matt Damon and Di Caprio in "The Departed" for which Scorcese won the Best Director.
TRUE justice is invariably poetic. When Martin Scorsese, a week ago, won the Best Director Oscar for "The Departed", he received it, appropriately enough, from Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola and George Lucas. For a few moments, after Scorsese had bounded on to the stage like an unleashed puppy, amid all the backslapping and man-hugs, a defining generation of American filmmaking stood within a few square metres of space. Then Scorsese, long-acknowledged master of masters, long denied by the Academy, broke away to deliver his acceptance speech.
He had to tamp down a raucous standing ovation to do so. Most of Hollywood realises that he should have won the award, at a rough guess, about seven million times by now. The Academy's persistent ignorance of Scorsese — as of Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and Robert Altman in earlier decades — had already undergone the ultimate subversion.
Scorsese towered so high in his repute that it had begun to reflect on the Academy and its dubious tastes that Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson had Best Director Oscars where Scorsese had none. Last Sunday's win wasn't redemption for Scorsese; it was redemption for the Academy. And there's always poetry in redemption.
There's poetry too in unrequited love finally being returned. Scorsese has been married five times; but his first love, his lifelong, consuming passion has always been cinema.
In 2000, the New Yorker reported that he owned "a few thousand" films in 16 and 35mm reels; this did not include his video collection, which then numbered 25,000. What's more, he's seen most of them.
Love affair with films
On his sets, he is a fast-walking, fast-talking encyclopaedia of film, constantly referring to old TV shows, orchestral scores or obscure Italian classics, recalling astonishing degrees of detail. This has been a public love affair ever since "Mean Streets" in 1973, and it's been a private love affair since Scorsese's boyhood, when he followed his favourite films from theatre to theatre, watching endless iterations. The Best Director Oscar may only be a token of returned affection, but it's a token everybody wanted him to get.
There's poetry in the timing of Scorsese's victory, coming as it did in what has been called the most international Oscars ever. A remarkably high proportion of the contenders were either from overseas — "Babel", "Pan's Labyrinth", "The Queen", Penelope Cruz, Judi Dench, Peter O'Toole, Alfonso Cuaron — or wrestled with international themes — "Letters from Iwo Jima", "The Last King of Scotland", "Blood Diamond". To even watch all the films must have been to live in a modern-day "Babel", with Spanish, Berber, Japanese, variously accented English, French, Arabic and sign language tripping enthusiastically over each other. This must have also been the most subtitled Oscars ever.
In such a year, the Academy voted for America — and not the off-kilter, innocence-affirming America of "Little Miss Sunshine", but the hard, violent, familiar America of "The Departed". This is Scorsese's territory; time after time, he has scoured New York, and here Boston, for stories that are rooted unshakeably in their land. It didn't matter that Scorsese adapted "The Departed" from the Chinese "Infernal Affairs"; once he was done with it, it was Boston's movie, through and through.
Scorsese has been called the greatest living American filmmaker, but he's also the greatest living quintessentially American filmmaker, and in the face of hot international competition, the local boy won out.
There's poetry in how Scorsese had always been competitive, and how his Oscar has come, by his own admission, for a movie where he just wanted to "relax and make as good a film as we can". A few years ago, in an interview, Scorsese said: "As a filmmaker, you're naturally competitive. But you have to realise that it doesn't matter how your films are going to stack up against other people's. You have to stop whining about it and just get to work. Because in the work is your existence. That's what you're here for."
But we didn't need him to tell us how intimately his work was wrapped up with his existence; we can see it on screen, writ larger than life.
Influence on the Oscars
There's poetry, most of all, in the fact that Scorsese has been part of the Oscar heartbeat for years — not merely physically, by directing the annual montage tribute to cinema's recently demised, as he has often done, but also spiritually. He was present in Steven Soderbergh's washed-out, gritty tones in "Traffic", in Oliver Stone's examinations of moral ambiguities in "Platoon", in Jonathan Demme's pulsing eeriness in "The Silence of The Lambs", in Steven Spielberg's kinetic action in "Saving Private Ryan", in Anthony Minghella's effortless camerawork in "The English Patient", in the dry crackle of Sam Mendes' "American Beauty".
Sunday's award was just affirmation. If influence has anything to do with it, Scorsese has won his Oscar many times over.
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