![]() ![]() He’s already prepping his next, and long may he reign, but he had to know The Irishman would feel like a summation-it’s the period at the end of a sentence that began with Mean Streets in 1973. ![]() Scorsese is 77 he directed his first feature 52 years ago. Part of that is a matter of circumstance. Spend a day watching The Irishman and Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood as a double feature-and I do mean a day it’s a six-and-a-half-hour commitment-and what you will see and hear is a long goodbye. Both movies take as their subject the waning of an alpha-male primacy that has dominated film culture, one that was always an illusion. ![]() It’s hard not to feel that these two pictures-both of them big, muscular swings for the fences-were always meant to end up in each other’s company, and in the Academy’s.īut what’s most striking about this matchup isn’t how long it’s been in coming: It’s how elegiac it feels, how full of an awareness that a moment for a kind of movie-and for a kind of long-celebrated male character-is passing, perhaps deservedly. The films even share some essential connective tissue: Al Pacino, who had never worked with either director before this year, appears in both movies, and Leonardo DiCaprio, currently being celebrated for his second collaboration with Tarantino, is about to embark on his sixth with Scorsese. And this year’s Oscars could give them both a victory lap: Barring a major surprise, Scorsese’s The Irishman and Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in…Hollywood are poised to compete for best picture and just about every other award not involving actresses. They’re winners (Scorsese for directing and Tarantino twice for writing) who nevertheless went unhonored for directing the movies that are seen as their masterpieces, Raging Bull and Pulp Fiction. Both men come bedecked with-maybe even burdened by-Oscar history. Scorsese versus Tarantino: the old master who spent his childhood at the movies versus the video-store kid who grew up on that old master, as well as everything else he could grab off the shelves. It’s an Academy Awards showdown for the ages, if not exactly for this age. ![]()
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