Leonardo DiCaprio last Sunday ended one of Hollywood’s longest losing streaks by taking home the Best Actor Oscar for his role in the glacial, gruesome survival epic The Revenant.
The are people in gainful employment right now who weren’t even born when DiCaprio was first nominated for an Oscar — in 1993 for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.
The long wait tortured his fans and gave awards-season watchers hours of crystal-ball-invoking conversations about his chances each time he was nominated. It wasn’t for a lack of trying — DiCaprio, 41, has appeared in some of cinema’s biggest hitters and worked with the industry’s top guns. Year after year, his films nail the elusive combo Hollywood lusts after: Box-office big bucks and piles of critical acclaim (of course, studios will go with the former and dispense with the latter, if necessary. Case in point: Furious 7).
The Hollywood-born actor wasted no time in getting into the industry, taking in child roles in TV shows, before graduating to an Oscar-bait role as a mentally challenged young man in Gilbert ..., for which he got a Best Actor in a Supporting Role nomination from the Academy.
After making a segue into teen-heartthrob territory with Titanic and Romeo + Juliet, he’d then wait 10 years for another nod — for The Aviator (2005). That film was his second pairing with director Martin Scorsese, a director who knows only too well the agony of waiting decades for an Oscar (first nominated in 1981 for Raging Bull, Scorsese was denied an Oscar until 2006’s Departed, starring, well, well, DiCaprio).
The actor also got nods for Blood Diamond (2007) and The Wolf Of Wall Street (2014). Each year, the awards derby watchers did DiCaprio a disservice by noting that he was always up against fierce competition — as if he could only win in a weaker pool of actors.
Perhaps DiCaprio decided to give them something they really couldn’t argue with: Near hypothermia. Eating raw bison liver (and he’s a vegetarian). A bear-mauling nearly as vicious as the contents of a Sony executive’s leaked emails. And Alejandro Inarritu and Emanuel Lubezki, the unstoppable Mexican director-cinematographer duo who swept the Oscars a year earlier with Birdman.
Even now, with the award in the bag, it’s not unusual to hear that it was ‘just his year’; the Academy had to give it to him — even if The Revenant isn’t the best role he’s ever been nominated for. That’s not entirely incorrect — lobbying and public opinion have as much to say in the awards as acting skill. The 6,000-plus Academy voters may have felt DiCaprio’s indignity gnawing at them.
But now he’s won — even if he nearly left his Oscar in a bar after some particularly ferocious post-ceremony partying — and it’s time to unpack that success. Here are five takeaways from DiCaprio’s Oscar win.
n The environmentalist
After 23 years of near-misses, DiCaprio could have come to the Oscars stage triumphant — or bitter. He did neither, thankfully. Instead, like any modern celebrity, he used it as a platform for his pet cause: Climate change. “Climate change is real,” he said on stage at the Dolby Theatre. “It is happening right now. It’s the most urgent threat facing our entire species and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating.” He also promoted government policy as the way forward, urging millions of viewers to “support leaders around the world who do not speak for the big polluters ... I thank you all for this amazing award tonight. Let us not take this planet for granted. I do not take tonight for granted.”
DiCaprio has environmentalist chops: He started a foundation in 1998, aiming to protect biodiversity, ocean and forest conservation and climate change. In 2014, he was designated a United Nations Messenger of Peace with a special focus on climate change. He’s spoken at the World Economic Forum in Davos and at the recent Paris climate talks.
He’s the Angelina Jolie for the planet.
But he also flies around the world, a lot, including one notorious party when he rang in the New Year in Sydney, then chartered a Boeing 747 to Las Vegas to do it all over again. He frequently cavorts on diesel-guzzling yachts and generally lives the life of a single 41-year-old superstar with millions of dollars to burn through.
Critics didn’t miss a beat, and post-Oscars coverage was dominated with experts calling him a hypocrite.
He’ll likely ignore them, continue work to turn his private island in Belize into a high-end green resort; talk shop with scientists and world leaders from the Pope to John Kerry; and produce documentaries about the environment for Netflix, as part of a multi-year deal he signed a year ago.
n His career will have mass (murderer) appeal
If you didn’t have the stomach for The Revenant’s gore, look away now. DiCaprio’s next film is The Devil in the White City, in which he’ll play America’s first serial killer, H.H. Holmes. The character is a mix of psychopath and charming conman — something that DiCaprio has already proven he can handle. His Appian Way production house also has Ben Affleck’s prohibition drama Live By Night, and a Robin Hood origin story on its slate.
n The serial monogamist
DiCaprio has a third string to his celebrity bow: He’s known for dating, almost exclusively, models (almost exclusively blonde ones), who join him in his yacht-cavorting, much to the delight of the tabloids. The last couple of decades have seen him partner up with many a Victoria’s Secret Angel, from Gisele Bundchen to Bar Refali to Erin Heatherton to Toni Garrn for months and years-long relationships. The position is currently vacant.
n RIP that meme
When DiCaprio won, the internet lost. In his lengthy career, DiCaprio has given us dozens of iconic scenes of his top-notch emoting. That didn’t guarantee him any awards, but it did mean plenty of tearful imagery ripe for gifs and internet memes about how he really felt about not winning. Since February 28, that’s no longer the case, but it doesn’t make them any less entertaining. And he still gave the internet something to feed on: His win generated more than 440,000 tweets per minute, the most-tweeted minute of an Oscars telecast ever, beating out the previous record of 255,000 tweets per minute, set Ellen DeGeneres’ selfie.
n The world loves him and Kate Winslet together
Who doesn’t get chills hearing Rose tell Jack: “I’ll never let go, Jack. I’ll never let go”? The world hasn’t let go of Jack and Rose, either. DiCaprio and his Titanic co-star Winslet celebrated their everlasting friendship by posing together on the Oscars red carpet; when his name was read out, cameras zoomed to Winslet for a perfectly-timed clasping of her hands in joy. In this solid and respectful pairing, we finally have something to thank James Cameron for.
