Amidst the various aspects of industry furor surrounding this film is emerging the issue of whether or not Scorsese ought to be presented with a Best Director Academy Award for the film should it turn out to be even halfway decent. Absurd as this may seem in principle, there are a host of reasons lending credence to this argument, one that comes up almost every year when a never-rewarded veteran performer, in what is likely his or her final performance of note, is nominated.
There are degrees of integrity to this phenomenon; most often, however, it is the case of someone being brought into the limelight by virtue of the performance of that one person, who the industry suddenly regards as hallowed. Examples of this are Gloria Stuart of "Titanic," who really didn't have much of a career in her so-called heyday in the '30s anyway, yet was the favorite for weeks to win the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1997; the winner that year, Kim Basinger, whose performance in "L.A. Confidential" was generally acknowledged to have been one that any semi-decent actress could have pulled off, was duly rewarded for her perceived "comeback" (after a respite from a career whose highlights were the roles of the blond trollop in "9 1/2 Weeks" and "Batman.")
Of course Scorsese isn't just any director, but the problem runs deeper. He has never won a Best Director Academy Award, and moreover, whereas in many cases people's continued losses can be justified on a case-by-case basis, Scorsese's can't.
The first oversight came in 1973, when he failed even to receive a nomination for "Mean Streets." The film, visually stark and jarringly violent, was part of the counter-culture revolution of the late '60s and early '70s that, though it was embraced by audiences and profoundly altered the course of mainstream American filmmaking for the remainder of the century, was much too threatening to the old guard of the Academy to recognize.
Arguably, the most outrageous oversight came in 1976, when Scorsese failed even to receive a Best Director nomination for "Taxi Driver." The reason was the same as three years ago. 1976 featured one of the strongest Best Picture lineups in history, but of the other four, three-"Rocky," "All the President's Men" and "Bound for Glory"-were examples of safer and more traditional filmmaking. The fourth, "Network," though it carried a message of a cultural rebellion of sorts, was nowhere near as deeply disturbing as the post-apocalyptic "Taxi Driver." The fact that the winner was "Rocky," the most comfortably inspirational and probably the weakest of the five, is in itself explanatory of why Scorsese had a snowball's chance in hell.
In 1980, Scorsese made "Raging Bull." The film was better received in what was by then a more accepting Hollywood (that year, David Lynch was nominated in both Director and Picture categories for "The Elephant Man") and received eight nominations, but the top prizes went to Robert Redford's family drama "Ordinary People"-thematically miles away from "Raging Bull's" pulsing vitriol.
Unsurprisingly, Scorsese was again unsuccessful with 1988's "The Last Temptation of Christ," a film so dubiously received that it failed even to garner a Best Picture nomination. His last real shot, 1990's "Goodfellas," lost to Kevin Costner's shamelessly pandering "Dances With Wolves," a loss that clearly requires no explanation.
The fact that Scorsese has, over the past twelve years, continued to make sincere and elaborate efforts-"Cape Fear" (1991), "The Age of Innocence" (1993), "Kundun" (1997), "Bringing out the Dead" (1999), among others-that have simply failed to live up to his earlier brilliance has likely been upping the anxiety behind the Academy's guilt. Thus the case for rewarding him for "Gangs of New York" is becoming stronger and stronger. To begin with, it is uncertain how many more films Scorsese, who is a drug-ravaged, tense, generally unhealthy 60 years old, has left in him. Crude as this thought may sound, its reality is undoubtedly a consideration. It happened in the case of Stanley Kubrick, who died just before the release of "Eyes Wide Shut" while already in the early planning stages of his next movie.
In addition, "Gangs" would be an appropriate film for which to reward Scorsese because of its enormous personal significance to the filmmaker. He has been yearning to make a movie about the bloody street gang wars in turn-of-the-century New York for literally decades; he constructed a gargantuan 1.5 square-mile reproduction of a city for its set in Italy's historic Cinecitta Studios to ensure the fulfillment of his vision, and has been in various stages of production on the film for well over four years.
It is the riskiest and most expensive film he has ever attempted. In addition, it represents a return, thematically, to many of is earlier works: set on his beloved New York streets, it deals with purging violence in a way that none of his films have done since "Goodfellas." Rewarding this would be rewarding, in a sense, the old Marty, almost regardless of whether or not the film lives up to his ability.
Perhaps the strongest incentive for the Academy to reward Scorsese is the fact that his never receiving a Best Director statuette would go down as a black mark in history books, joining the very top tier of most outrageous Academy victims where only three other people reside. Martin Scorsese ending his filmmaking career without a Best Director Oscar would be akin to Orson Welles and Alfred Hitchcock never receiving the award, and to Cary Grant's failure to ever receive a Best Actor statuette. In the final analysis, the individual circumstances of these respective losses don't matter. The result is more than just an embarrassment: it's a circumstance that leads to wretched and regretful feelings for everyone involved, audiences and Academy members and filmmakers alike.
In the end, the question comes down to whether the immediate embarrassment and obvious insincerity of rewarding Scorsese for an unworthy film based on this undeniably compelling principle are less important than the possible embarrassment of having such a tarnished record for the sake of justice one year.
On the other hand, the Academy's legitimacy is consistently undermined by the unjust, haphazard, unsuitably motivated choices it makes year after year at the annual awards. And in truth, the more frequently this happens, the less the value of owning a Best Director statuette becomes. In the end, neither solution is entirely satisfactory. The ideal, unfortunately, would be to rewrite history.