Poor Leonardo DiCaprio fans. You are all in a tizzy, and why not? Leo, your man, your light, your reason for living, was viciously snubbed for a Best Actor nomination for this year's Oscars. Strange, isn't it -- how Titanic set sail with 14 nominations, and yet poor Leo was left at port? How could they give Kate Winslet a nomination and not recognize the man who happily froze in the North Atlantic for her? Is there no justice in this world? None at all?
There, there. I feel your pain. And though nothing could possibly correct this terrible injustice at this point, I can offer you this: an explanation. Without futher ado, here's Why Leo Got Snubbed at the Oscars.
1. He's Too Young.
Leonardo, bless his hunky little heart, is all of 23 years old -- far too young to be nominated for Best Actor. No, it's not as if there's a formal age requirement. But all you have to do is look at a list of past nominees. You have to go back 20 years to find a Best Actor nominee under the age of 25 -- that would be John Travolta, in Saturday Night Fever. In the last ten years, there have only been three actors under 30 who have been nominated -- Robert Downey, Jr., for Chaplin, Kenneth Branagh, for Henry V, and Tom Cruise, for Born on the Fourth of July. The youngest winner in the last 10 years -- Daniel Day-Lewis, for My Left Foot. He was 31. (Matt Damon, this year's youngest nominee, is 27.)
The point here -- Best Actor has always skewed older than the other acting categories. Now, age is not a problem in other categories -- Leo was nominated for Best Supporting Actor in What's Eating Gilbert Grape when he was just 19, which is also the age of the youngest winner of that category, Timothy Hutton, for Ordinary People. But if you want Leo to win Best Actor, you might have to wait another decade or two.
2. He Was in the Wrong Role.
Jack Dawson, Leo's character in Titanic, was young, smart, capable, quick-witted, chivalric, and an all-around swell guy. In short, a leading man. Problem is, "leading men" roles almost never win the Best Actor Oscar.
To win the Best Actor Oscar, you have to have one of the four following things:
a) A character who is seriously screwed-up;
b) A character who is handicapped either mentally or physically;
c) A character who is dying;
d) You yourself have been denied an Oscar several times before and it's time for the Academy to cough one up.
Now, let's apply these to the Best Actor winners for the last ten years:
1996 -- Geoffrey Rush in Shine (Character seriously screwed-up)
1995 -- Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas (Character screwed-up and dying)
1994 -- Tom Hanks in Forrest Gump (Character mentally handicapped)
1993 -- Tom Hanks in Philadelphia (Character dying)
1992 -- Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman (Character physically handicapped; Pacino passed up 7 times previously)
1991 -- Anthony Hopkins in Silence of the Lambs (Character seriously screwed-up)
1990 -- Jeremy Irons in Reversal of Fortune (Character screwed-up, Irons owed for Dead Ringers pass-up)
1989 -- Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot (Character physically handicapped)
1988 -- Dustin Hoffman in Rain Man (Character mentally handicapped)
1987 -- Michael Douglas in Wall Street. This is the only one that doesn't fit: the character is not truly screwed-up, handicapped or dying, and Douglas already had an Oscar (for producing One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest). However, the character is a bad guy -- not a leading man.
The decade before this is much the same: Only Dustin Hoffman (Kramer v. Kramer) and Richard Dreyfuss (The Goodbye Girl) won without their character being messed up, handicapped, or dying. And neither of those characters were typical leading men roles, either.
Interestingly, Leo's Supporting Actor nomination in Gilbert Grape came from playing a character who was mentally handicapped. You see the pattern.
3. He's too good looking.
Very few recent Best Actor winners are "movie star handsome." The closest in the last decade is Daniel Day-Lewis, but his character in My Left Foot was certainly not handsome in any conventional sense. Tom Hanks is good-looking, but in that "Your Best Buddy" sort of way. Nicolas Cage isn't bad looking, but he can look creepy far too easily. None of these guys would be confused for Cary Grant (who, by the way, never won the Best Actor Oscar -- he had to settle for an honorary award).
Yes, yes, I know none of this is fair. But the Oscars aren't about being fair -- they're about Hollywood. But don't worry. Leo will be around for a while. He'll probably get another shot at it.
I did not write this article. I took it directly from AOL Insider. It was written by John Scalzi. John Scalzi is a writer and editor at America Online. His column appears daily in AOL Today, Monday through Friday evenings (except for holidays and days when he's abducted by aliens for bizarre experimentation).
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