It’s become a running joke in cinephile circles that Martin Scorsese, one of our great American filmmakers, is hated by the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences. That might not seem right at first blush. He’s the most-nominated living director. Over six decades, his movies have won 20 Oscars and earned 101 nominations. But those are his movies—his finished products, his actors and crewmates. For himself, for directing, Scorsese has only ever gotten one Academy Award. It was even worse before 2006, when he’d been nominated over and over again without a single trophy to his name. That finally changed with The Departed, a remake of the gripping Hong Kong cop drama Infernal Affairs, which got Scorsese his first and only Oscar win for Best Director, before he fell back into the status quo of perennial Oscar bridesmaid.
It’s not like The Departed is Scorsese’s best film—even Oscars agnostics understand that’s not really how it works—though it is an excellent film. But through a strange combination of factors, it might be the one that symbolizes the most aspects of Scorsese’s career: his devotion to international cinema, his dogged longevity, his auteurist obsessions, and his popcorn sensibilities. And it all grows from a multicultural artistic ouroboros that a film history devotee like Scorsese couldn’t help but respect: The Departed is an adaptation of an Asian crime thriller, which was indebted to the brash masculine posturing of a Hong Konger in Hollywood (John Woo and his delightfully lurid Face/Off), whose wild movie was a heightened take on classic scrappy film noir flicks like White Heat.
It’s no wonder, then, that the dual story of an undercover cop and a crooked officer was intended, in Scorsese’s telling, to compose the “B film” counterpart to the “spectacle” of The Aviator. After pouring himself into that 2004 epic (which earned him a nomination but not a win for Director), he wanted to go back to the relative simplicity of violent American gangsters waging war in the city streets—the kind of thing that had long formed a foundation for the country’s movies and (unfairly) become his trademark among popular audiences. To do so, he assembled a starry cast, broad Boston accents, and blunt-force imagery the average moviegoer couldn’t help but goggle at.
The first of these images is the shadow of Jack Nicholson, lording over his corner of Boston like the Devil himself (the first of several Satanic framings). Fittingly, his seduction of young Colin (Matt Damon) into the criminal underworld is juxtaposed with the alternate pull of the Church. It’s just the first way in which Scorsese swaps Infernal Affairs‘ eternal Buddhist suffering for unrelenting Catholic guilt, while maintaining that shared sense of brooding that connects the urban ennui of East and West.
Colin’s the gang’s inside man on the police force; his foil, Billy (Leonardo DiCaprio) goes undercover to infiltrate said gang. Snitch vs. rat, criminal cop vs. cop-as-criminal. Doubled images, doubled lives, and plenty of Xed-out faces ensue. The moral fiber of each is strained, their paranoid consciences wracked, their social spheres and economic positions polarized. And so much of this, despite it all clicking perfectly into place with Scorsese’s profane predilections, was found in the Hong Kong original. That whole scenes, set pieces, and flourishes of style are kept intact not only shows the universality of this premise’s delicious ethical dilemma and Scorsese’s omnivorous artistic appetite, but the way that cinematic language is an eternal lingua franca. If there is a major difference between the movies, it’s in pace, tone, and mood—perhaps it’s the mere presence of Tony Leung, but there’s something far more seductive and sleek about Infernal Affairs. The Departed is bleaker, harsher, meaner. It is set in Boston, after all.
And yet, that brutal locale allowed Scorsese to forever make the Dropkick Murphys his own, to have Mark Wahlberg say “microprawcessuhhs,” and to finally end that Oscar drought. Scorsese playing into his own stereotype, the guy who cut to the heart of America with his violent smartmouthed bastards, was the excuse the Academy needed to give him his flowers. That The Departed made nearly $300 million didn’t hurt.
Neither did Scorsese’s lengthy and consistent career up until that point. When The Departed came out, he’d been making movies, well-liked award-winning movies, for over three decades. A generation had grown up with him as a household name. This was Scorsese’s make-up Oscar, an award long-deserved from an industry that had awarded pretty much everyone around the filmmaker—like his New Hollywood compatriots Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg. Those two (and George Lucas, who’s only got an Honorary Oscar, but hey, that’s what the money is for) were on stage to announce Scorsese’s Best Director victory, capped with Spielberg shouting “Mazel tov!” in his ear.
In his speech, Scorsese thanked all the usual suspects, and also stopped to mention Infernal Affairs director Andrew Lau and “the wonderful Asian cinema.” Even in this moment, the image of Scorsese was twofold: The champion of movies everywhere, and the American symbol of cinema. He illustrated the latter with a brief story about how, seemingly, the whole country had been aware of his undeservedly bad luck at the Oscars. “So many people over the years have been wishing this for me. Strangers, you know? I’m walking in the street, people say something to me,” he said. “I go into a doctor’s office, elevators, I go in for an x-ray—’You should win one! You should win one!'”
And one is all he’s won, still. Scorsese has kept on directing great movies during the 20 years since The Departed momentarily broke this weird and prickly curse cast upon him by his peers, but his track record at the Oscars is now actually in the worst dry spell of his career. Whether it’s because expectations for his movies have gotten out of control, because his visibility as a national figure of cinema has caused Hollywood to take his work for granted, or because the Academy—now flooded with new members—is simply tired of the old guard, Scorsese’s films haven’t had a single win since Hugo back in 2011. But trophies aren’t everything, and Scorsese’s continued status among cinephiles (and not among the Academy) is our greatest living proof of that truth.
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