Officially, Martin Scorsese received two nominations for this year's Oscars. He's a contender for Best Picture, as a producer, and the Best Director statuette for his long-gestating epic The Irishman. However, there's a fellow nominee whose movie is noticeably indebted to the old master's filmography. So much so, that some would go as far as to say that these other project's nominations are due to nostalgia for the Scorsese of yore as much as they are to this new movie's actual quality.
We're talking about Todd Phillips and his triple nomination for the Joker…
The comedy director turned prestige filmmaker was nominated for Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay, matching Bong Joon-ho, Sam Mendes and Quentin Tarantino at this year's triple nominee club. That said, there's something rather horrible about the whole thing and this isn't a reference to Joker's debatable mediocrity. As it happens, DC Comics shining jewel managed to get more nominations than the combined Oscar loot of both of the Scorsese classics it so shamelessly plunders for cinematic iconography.
Back in 1976, Taxi Driver got only four nods and Scorsese himself wasn't even among the honored. The movie was nominated for Best Picture, Actor (Robert De Niro), Supporting Actress (Jodie Foster) and Original Score (Bernard Herrmann, posthumously). When it comes to The King of Comedy, which Joker leans extra heavily on, the situation is even worse. Whatever its current status as a masterful classic may be, 1983's poisonous portrait of an aspiring comedian wasn't very well-received at the time (BAFTA was the sole group interested) and it didn't even manage one measly Oscar nomination.
Considering such injustices, it's less painful to think about the Joker's dominance as a retroactive celebration of Scorsese's mistreated masterpieces of the past. One thing's for sure, if these races whittle down to Martin Scorsese versus Scorsese-wannabe, let's hope the Academy doesn't indulge in one of their occasional bouts of insanity. If you're going to award Scorsese-esque cinema, at least single out the real deal and not the copycat. On the eventuality that we're living in the worst timeline, at least Todd Phillips should have the decency of honoring The Irishman's director in his speech(es). After all, we live in a society.
