Oscar Finally Knocks At Marty's Door

How cool is it that Martin Scorsese finally won an Academy Award for Best Director last night for The Departed?

There’s a whole bunch of Scorsese movies that I haven’t gotten around to yet, such as The Color of Money, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Cape Fear and No Direction Home about Bob Dylan (yes I know – what I am waiting for, right?).

But among the ones I have seen, I would have to put Raging Bull, Goodfellas, The Age of Innocence and The Aviator at the top of the list, with Casino and The Last Waltz (annoying, fawning interviews and all, more than made up for by the great performances) as close seconds.

I’m sure anything I have to say has already been expressed by those who know more about this stuff than I do, but I’d never seen such stark use of violence and language in the movies until I saw Taxi Driver and the other Robert DeNiro-Joe Pesci movies, including Raging Bull and Goodfellas (I thought Taxi Driver was hurt by it’s happily-ever-after-sort-of ending; Casino was interesting also, but the formula was really getting old by then).

I think it’s interesting to watch the earlier Scorsese movies I just mentioned and then watch The Age of Innocence and The Aviator to see how Scorsese’s understanding of basic human motivations was incorporated into other settings and periods of time (for example, you can sense a similarity of the pining Daniel Day-Lewis felt for Michelle Pfeiffer in “Innocence” versus that felt by DeNiro for Cathy Moriarty in Raging Bull, but in the former movie, the societal conventions prohibited the male from acting on those urges, but not so in the latter one). And you truly understand the technical challenges Howard Hughes (Leonardo DiCaprio – really tough call between him and Jamie Foxx last year for Ray, I thought, though Foxx was certainly deserving) encountered while building the “Spruce Goose” as he fought his personal demons also – that’s a dimension of Scorsese’s filmmaking that developed over time.

And anyone who would make a film as crazed as After Hours certainly should earn a special place among directors as far as I’m concerned (and The King of Comedy was truly difficult, a film almost destroyed single handedly by Sandra Bernhard).

So congratulations to Scorsese for his visionary films, often so truthful in their complexity and eloquent in their brutality (and for the five-part PBS series The Blues also). And with his win last night, I may even give Kundun and Bringing Out The Dead another shot also.