I’m glad Katey mentioned the great Martin Scorsese in today’s subscriber-only Prestige Junkie After Party, because invoking his name feels appropriate for this year’s best director race. Scorsese was rather famously snubbed by the Academy for years. By the time Scorsese directed The Departed, it felt like his moment had passed. But then, he won — with a crime drama about crooked cops and gangsters that’s as funny as any actual comedy and so unserious it ends with an image of a rat.
I thought of The Departed and Scorsese a lot while watching One Battle After Another, Paul Thomas Anderson’s new movie, and, to my eyes, the project that will get Anderson the Oscar he has so richly deserved. Anderson’s history with the Academy is actually worse to this point than what Scorsese went through: the Boogie Nights auteur has been nominated 11 times as a director, writer or producer, and never won. But, according to our pundits, Anderson should start prepping his eventual Oscar speech. While Anderson is tied with Sinners director Ryan Coogler and Hamnet filmmaker Chloé Zhao in terms of likelihood of being nominated, currently, 10 of our 16 experts predict Anderson will win. If Anderson was able to snag three nods for a low-key masterpiece like Licorice Pizza, it seems possible a noisy, entertaining mainstream feature with Leonardo DiCaprio can finally get him over the top. After all, it worked for Scorsese.
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