Martin Scorsese’s penultimate film is called “The Irishman”. It was released in 2019 and lasted 209 minutes. Three hours and 29 minutes. He was nominated for ten Oscars.
Scorse’s most recent film is “Killers of the Flower Moon” from 2023. It was nominated for ten Oscars. It lasts: 206 minutes. Three hours and 26 minutes.
Actually a dream, right? Bold streaming services allow one of the most important directors of all time to make a film that can be as long as the director wants. He also receives the right to the final cut. With this final cut privilege, the 81-year-old is in an exclusive circle of filmmakers that also includes Steven Spielberg, Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan.
“The Irishman” was produced by Netflix, “Killers of the Flower Moon” by Apple – both companies were happy to have the “New Hollywood” legend on board for projects. Both works earned Scorsese some of the best reviews of his 50-plus year career.
And yet Martin Scorsese is by far the biggest Oscar loser in recent Oscar history. His four films since 2015, “The Wolf of Wall Street”, “Silence”, “The Irishman” and “Killers of the Flower Moon” received an incredible 26 nominations – and not a single award went to him or his team.
What could simply be bad luck with “Silence” – only cameraman Rodrigo Prieto was nominated – is hugely unlucky with “Wolf”, “Irishman” and “Killers”. You have to search quite extensively to find films that recently received so many Academy Awards nominations (five, ten, ten) and then came away completely empty-handed. Even the second biggest Oscar loser in recent Oscar history, Steven Spielberg, nominated dozens of times after “Saving Private Ryan” and never one to be lucky, only got seven nominations in 2023 with the completely ignored “The Fabelmans”.
This must be very disturbing for Martin Scorsese. For “The Irishman” and “Killers of the Flower Moon,” he was given complete freedom to expand his story. And from the 1970s to the noughties, he often suffered from the demands of the studios and producers, who urged him to shorten his work. 1985’s After Hours is now considered a minor masterpiece, but filming and post-production were sheer stress for Scorsese. He shot “Gangs of New York” for Miramax in 2001; Harvey Weinstein, also known as Harvey Scissorhands, reportedly worked in the editing room to trim the story from more than 200 minutes to 163 minutes. Scorsese went along with it, he also put up with Weinstein because only Miramax wanted to realize his heart’s project about the early days of New York gang crime.
Was Weinstein correct in his assumption that “Gangs of New York” would have been too long to be successful without his intervention? This film also came away completely empty-handed – with ten Oscar nominations. It grossed almost $200 million and was a hit. Netflix and Apple only released the two Scorsese epics in cinemas – briefly – so that they met the criteria for Oscar nominations.
Netflix and Apple can dump buckets of money on their miracle director – but the Oscars haven’t paid it back yet. It’s hard to imagine that the Academy would penalize Scorsese simply because of the length of his recent films. What does that even mean – “excess length?” “Excessive length” is a fundamentally anti-film expression that reduces our desire for viewing pleasure to absurdity, and of course it is not used by viewers, but only in cinemas.
But it is now also clear that a completely free Martin Scorsese has no free rein at the Oscars. And “Parasite” was simply better than “Irishman” and “Oppenheimer” was better than “Killers”. The fact that he received his only directing Oscar in 2006 for, of all things, “The Departed,” a very good film but not his best, fits into the picture that Martin Scorsese and the Oscars don’t really want to mix. The “Departed” Oscar was a lifetime achievement recognition Oscar, not an honor for this film.
Playing time is rarely an argument for quality. Nevertheless, let’s take a look at Scorsese’s most celebrated works: “Taxi Driver” lasted 114 minutes, “Raging Bull” 129 minutes and “GoodFellas” 146 minutes.
Who is now talking to Scorsese so that he either leaves the streamers – or makes shorter films again? His long-time companion in the editing room, editor Thelma Schoonmaker, probably won’t do it.