‘Inside Llewyn Davis’ and ‘Blue Jasmine’ (best actress aside) have been shunned from the principal Oscar award categories. How was ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’ snubbed for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Screenplay nominations? Likewise ‘Blue Jasmine’ for Best director and Best picture? What movie award ceremony can put a movie like ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ ahead of ‘Inside Llewyn Davis‘ and ‘Blue Jasmine’. I tell you one- The Oscars. See all nominations here.
Scorsese’s Wolf of Wall Street isn’t a patch on his 90’s greats Goodfellas or Casino, yet here it still gets Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor nods. Lets look at some statistics shall we? Scorsese’s ‘Wolf’ has just a 76% score by the film critics at Rotten Tomatoes and 81% of audience liked it, yet Blue Jasmine received 91% score by critics and 82% of the audiences liked it. ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’ 94% by the critics and 77% of audiences liked it. If you averaged out these scores ‘Jasmine’ and ‘Llewyn’ are markedly better received movies than the ‘Wolf’. What is probably most striking is how the ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ receives a ginormous 8.7/10 popularity on IMDB (a top 250 movie of all time) the same population who fueled Christopher Nolen’s Batman into the greatest movies of all time. So why all the love for Scorsese? See the folk on ‘the Wolf’s’ forum on IMD. They are the epicenter of Hollywood’s focus on payday.
As usual, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are a bit late giving Scorsese all the Oscar awards he was rightfully due .
This years Oscars also ignored the following actors:
Oscar Isaac ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’,
Joaquin Phoenix ‘Her’ , and
Tom Hanks for Captain Philips.
Any tinge of respectability I once had for the Oscars and its selection process has all but faded away into a mainstream oblivion of tabloid hysteria and Hollywood stardom. American Hustle received a staggering 10 nominations. You would think we had a classic movie on our hands. In a previous post I wrote about ‘American Hustle’:
‘Anyone even remotely familiar with Scorsese cannot deny that David Russell has lent heavily from Scorsese’s quintessential best movies to make American Hustle . The narratives, the music and editing, in particular the first half of the movie all point toward a seeming homage to Scorsese’s 90′s work, specifically Casino. Even De Niro makes a key entrance in a role so reminiscent of Casino wearing the same ginormous glasses Scorsese left us with in the final scene.‘
I’ll be tuning into other award ceremonies from now on for a bit more respectability about celebrating the art of film-making, perhaps like the Cannes Film Festival.
The Coen Brothers cinematic gem ‘Barton Fink‘ which highlights the hellish truth about Hollywood is now up in bright lights for everyone to see and probably has been since Citizen Kane was dismissed by the Oscars in 1941 because of its controversy surrounding its obvious connections with media tycoon Randolph Hearst . Everything is political and Hollywood epitomizes it.
“The more I live, the more I learn. The more I learn, the more I realize, the less I know.”- Michel Legrand
Observation Blogger 
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