Then, the Academy not only will be honoring one of its best. Later, it won't have to make up for yet another omission by giving Scorsese a Career Achievement Oscar -- just like the one slated Feb.
Why should Marty Scorsese get the Oscar this time? More than anything else, because he's earned it. Though there's controversy about whether it's really 's best movie, "The Aviator" is currently the front-runner and favorite, by virtue of its pack-leading 11 nominations. I think it's 's best movie. Still, Eastwood already has his well-deserved directorial Oscar, for 's "Unforgiven," and Payne is at the start of what looks like a terrific career.
Payne will probably win the best adapted screenplay Oscar for "Sideways" this year and eventually the younger guy will get his own director's prize -- though maybe we shouldn't be so sure. After all, people have said that about Scorsese since and "Mean Streets," when he was Scorsese is 62 now and still Oscarless, despite deserving it three times in the past: for "Taxi Driver" in , for "Raging Bull" in and for "GoodFellas" in Scorsese lost those three Oscars, I suspect, because the same qualities that make him a great director -- his dark and realistic view of the world, his genius for portraying violence and violent emotions, his brilliance at revealing men and women on the edge, his deep empathy for outsiders and the sheer battering intensity and many-faceted skills of his moviemaking -- work against him in a broad-based, sometimes sentimental contest like the Oscars.
You can understand, for example, why the Academy, in , shied away from giving Scorsese the director's prize, or even a nomination, for "Taxi Driver": a movie whose anti-hero Travis Bickle Robert De Niro at his peak , based on George Wallace assailant Artie Bremer, was a disturbed stalker and would-be political assassin. Travis, driving his cab through a lurid neon wilderness and Manhattan Gomorrah, was a near-maniac obsessed with guns and a year-old hooker named Iris Jodie Foster.
American movies, under the old Hayes Code, had for so long been purged of real criminal language or sexual behavior that, when directors like Scorsese, Eastwood, Don Siegel and Sam Peckinpah began using them in the '60s and '70s, they created a culture shock. These movies may have won Oscars for their actors, De Niro in "Raging Bull" and Pesci in "GoodFellas," but they still unsparingly revealed a brutality and dark side -- the viciousness of boxing and Jake, the bloodiness and corruption of the Cosa Nostra -- which, while eminently true to life, offended vulnerable viewers.
All three movies were attacked at the time for violence, profanity and misogyny, even though it's clearly the characters' violence, profanity and misogyny that we see: all the elements mostly scoured out or somewhat softened in the classic film noirs of the '40s or '50s that were among Scorsese's models. As someone raised in Little Italy, with the real gangsters and gang wars right in his face, Scorsese chose the truth for his scenarios, rock 'n' roll for his soundtracks and noir expressionism and mythic movie nightmares for his visual style.
He made modern noirs; baroque, explosive and seething with the bad behavior and vile language that made them real and alive. Even the old noirs, now classics, were rarely singled out in their time for Oscars. For a supposed director of art films, he's more interested in the world out on the street, or in the gutter. And his most recent, The Man Without a Past, saw him re-emerge into the global spotlight after some years at its fringe.
Michael Winterbottom Winterbottom's career presents a study in motion. As well as being technically brilliant and a seeming workaholic, Winterbottom is arguably the most politically astute director in the business, with an unerring eye for the stories that matter. British cinema would be lost without him. His two best pictures Boogie Nights and Magnolia are works of gob-smacking ambition in one so young - lush, multi-layered ensemble pieces that spotlight the damaged souls of his native San Fernando Valley.
Smaller in scale but no less turbulent, this undervalued effort is like a nail bomb in the guise of a romantic comedy. After a long career in TV, Haneke graduated to the big screen in the early 90s and audiences quickly came to know they were in for a profoundly uncomfortable experience.
The Piano Teacher, with Isabelle Huppert, was a disquieting study of a musician driven to agonies of despair and self-loathing. More recently, Time of the Wolf was an almost unwatchably horrible vision of post-apocalyptic Europe.
Walter Salles The godfather and trailblazer of the buena onda - the "good wave" of contemporary Latin American cinema, Salles's directorial reputation rests largely on two recent films, Central Station and Behind the Sun, which virtually on their own put Brazilian cinema on the map. But Salles is equally notable as a facilitator for other Brazilian projects - most importantly the sensational City of God, which he co-produced.
Alexander Payne Payne came to prominence in with his stunning high school satire Election, the Animal Farm of American sexual politics in the Clinton era. From here, Payne went on to direct About Schmidt, which gave Jack Nicholson the best role of his late career. With these two movies, Payne has established an auteur distinctiveness: amplifying the disappointment and regret lurking within the peppy, can-do civic culture of middle America, while acknowledging the sweetness and innocence that is still there.
Spike Jonze Born into millionaire stock and heir to the Spiegel mail-order catalogue fortune , Spike Jonze has installed himself as the genius jester in the court of King Hollywood. His debut, Being John Malkovich, was a delirious satire on celebrity culture, while Adaptation led the viewer on a slaloming joyride along the border between truth and fiction.
Inevitably, though, one cannot celebrate Jonze without also crediting his scriptwriter - the ingenious Charlie Kaufman. Aleksandr Sokurov The veteran Russian director is inexhaustibly prolific, making both features and documentaries, with 31 credits to his name over a year career.
His movies are powerful, poetic, often severe, and at their most accessible when they meditate on the nature of Russia. Sokurov had his biggest recent success with Russian Ark: a staggeringly ambitious single-take minute journey through the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. His latest movie, Father And Son, is an enigmatic and often baffling study of a father-son relationship between two soldiers. His work gets a lively, mixed reaction in the west, but Sokurov's admirers revere the haunting, occasionally austere power of his films.
Ang Lee He may have taken a bit of a stumble with The Hulk, his elevation to blockbusterdom, but the Taiwanese-born Lee clocked up plenty of brownie points over the preceding decade for his dazzling versatility, if nothing else.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon a record-breaker for a subtitled film , The Ice Storm, The Wedding Banquet and Sense and Sensibility are all testament to a career of wonderfully fertile cinematic cross-pollination.
Lee's proficiency at swapping genres, but retaining a purposeful humaneness, is his hallmark. Michael Moore You could say it's Moore's blend of humour, righteousness and persistence that has made his documentaries so successful, but his political commitment would be nothing without the film-making skills to back it up.
Bowling for Columbine has been one of the most influential films of recent years, affecting the public in a way that most directors on this list will never know, but it would never have become such a cause had it not been so rigorously researched, painstakingly constructed and broadly entertaining.
Wes Anderson No less an authority than Martin Scorsese recently tipped Anderson as the brightest hope for American cinema. Scripted in tandem with his actor buddy Owen Wilson, Anderson's work is literate, quirky and unexpectedly moving. His breakthrough picture, Rushmore, amounted to a poignant salute to high-school losers everywhere.
More recently, the vibrant, Salinger-esque The Royal Tenenbaums charted the decline and fall of a precocious New York family. Takeshi Kitano Few directors have ever made themselves look as cool as Kitano has. His shark-eyed gangster persona became a fixture of Japanese action thrillers in the s, but behind the camera his controlled blend of visual slapstick and sudden violence has become a distinctive style.
Recent efforts have seen him trying to diversify. Dolls was a subdued art film, but next year's Zatoichi is a sword-swishing crowd pleaser.
Richard Linklater Linklater is the grunge philosopher of independent cinema. Hailing from Austin, Texas, he casually defined an era with 's loose-knit, haphazard Slacker. The uproarious Dazed and Confused and the seductive Before Sunrise extolled the joys of footloose youth, while his animated Waking Life spun a woozy, bong-smoking rumination on dreams and reality.
Incredibly, Linklater recently graduated to the big time when his School of Rock hit number one at the US box office. In a supposedly unshockable age, that's some kind of cinematic achievement. Pavel Pawlikowski With only one substantial feature under his belt, Polish-born, British-based director Pawlikowski has arguably the slenderest claim of all to be on this list.
But Last Resort, with its mix of heartfelt social insight the then-radical subject of asylum seekers and improvisatory, documentary-style film-making, has exerted an influence of gigantic proportions on a whole generation of British cinema.
David O Russell Russell's natural habitat is the dysfunctional American family. He dished up a deadpan Oedipal comedy with 's Spanking the Monkey and then dispatched Ben Stiller cross-country in the freewheeling adoption caper Flirting With Disaster. Yet this tart, original talent adapts well to other terrain. On the one hand his big-budget Three Kings was an expert, high-concept war thriller.
On the other, it can be read as a savage assault on bungled US policy during the first Gulf War. He began having paranoid hallucinations and flipping out at people.
He said: "I was always angry, throwing glasses, provoking people, really unpleasant to be around. I always found, no matter what anybody said, something to take offence at.
I'd be the host, but at some point during the evening I'd flip out. He managed to get off the drugs was after a potentially lethal dose caused him massive internal bleeding in the late seventies, which was something of an epiphany. Only a man with all of this experience, passion, grit and talent can be crowned the best director of all time.
And, upon reflection, I believe he deserves that accolade. Long live Martin Scorsese. Featured image credit: PA Images. Topics: Director , Martin Scorsese. Chosen for You Chosen for You. Most Read Stories Most Read.
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