The Aviator

The Aviator (Director: Martin Scorsese)

THE AVIATOR is the 2004 Oscar winner for Best Supporting Actress (Cate Blanchett), Editing (Thelma Schoonmaker), Cinematography (Robert Richardson), Costumes (Sandy Powell), Art Direction (Dante Ferretti, Francesca LoSchiavo)

Scorsese's list of films is a who's-who of Oscar history, but he himself has never won in six tries including four Best Director nominations and two Best Adapted Screenplay nominations. You can actually see some ridiculous names who have a Best Director trophy, at least one more than Scorsese does, even though we all know that in any given year a certain film may touch Academy voters more than others. Kevin Costner has a Best Director Oscar, and beat Scorsese in 1990 when Dances With Wolves, an epic crowd-pleaser was easy Oscar bait to beat Scorsese and GoodFellas (one of my favorites of all-time).

The reason I introduce Scorsese with all this Oscar discussion is that The Aviator is very likely going to be one of those movies at the end of the year that will be recognized along with Scorsese, and there's going to be stiff competition from Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby. The intrigue involved with such a matchup is who will the Academy perceive "needs" an Oscar, as they always do. Eastwood has won, but he's also an old Hollywood vet whom everyone likes and might decide to christen yet again. However, everyone has been dying to give Scorsese that Oscar, which is why his loss in the 2002 Oscars to Roman Polanski was shocking on so many levels. We'll see. The Aviator opens in limited release December 17 and opens wide on Christmas Day.

Leonardo DiCaprio shows why many tabbed him to be the next great actor a little over ten years ago with a portrayal of Howard Hughes that is perfect. We get a look inside his enthusiasm, his quick mathematical brain, his charm with women, and his phobias. He's a man who wagered his entire life on turning his passions into reality, and the film begins with his Kubrickian (an adjective that is a bit of an anachronism considering Hughes came before Kubrick, but this should describe him nicely) perfectionism as director of the film Hell's Angels. The movie was easily the most expensive ever made, as Hughes kept tweaking it as a silent film and then re-shot it for sound, and still wanted to make changes after the film was shown to a receptive Hollywood audience who gave him a standing ovation.

Hell's Angels was just a precursor to Hughes' real passion, flight. Hughes' next project was to make planes, and with the same level of perfection he demanded in his movies, this proved to be a costly venture. The story takes shape as Hughes teams with TWA and is challenged by Pan-Am and owner Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin), who seeks to destroy the competition with the help of Senator Ralph Owen Brewster (Alan Alda). In the midst of this is Hughes' marriage to Katherine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett, who nearly veers into caricature from the get-go but then is her usual fabulous self) and his relationship with Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale). Hughes slowly sinks into madness and into the character in which we are more familiar, but the movie refrains from going into the last days. The film ends with an extremely sad and powerful note.

Scorsese's Best Director Oscar nomination is assured just from the incredible air scenes. During the Hell's Angels sequence where Hughes himself is in a plane filming thirty others that whiz by, it's hard not to feel dizzy, and not because Scorsese resorts to spinning and rotating the camera everywhere and cutting the film to death with quick shots, but because his camera hovers and points in places where you get the sense of the height and the speed. There are two great crash scenes as well, including one where Hughes was lucky to be alive. It's Scorsese's style that is amazingly apparent in a movie of this scale, where usually a director's signature is lost. There's the usual Scorsese splendor in scenes where lots of things are happening at once, and beautifully photographed by master Robert Richardson, who is surely going to get nominated for this if he doesn't get one for Kill Bill, Volume 2.

DiCaprio, Alda, and Blanchett have been tossed around as Oscar nominees, and I think DiCaprio is almost a lock. Blanchett also will likely get one. Like I said, her performance seemed too much in the beginning, but after that initial scene she was dynamite (and I'd say the caricature was dynamite, too--spot on, even if it had the tendency to grate a little). There's fine support in less showy roles from John C. Reilly, Adam Scott (whose main claim to fame may have been being the best thing about Torque), and Ian Holm. In a movie like this, there's a lot of good actors, and it takes skill to not make a nuisance of yourself when your screen time is going to be ten minutes or less. I'd say everyone in this movie did well.

This is the Year of the Biopic, and here's the crowning jewel. Scorsese, at the top of his game.