The poetic justices of Martin Scorsese’s triumph
Sunday, March 30th, 2008True justice is invariably poetic. When Martin Scorsese 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 onto the stage like an unleashed puppy, amidst 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 realizes 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