scent of an Oscar?

Al Pacino has deserved several Academy Awards but has only one once. It wasn't for either of the great Godfather films, it wasn't for best supporting actor in Glengarry Glen Ross, and it certainly wasn't for Scarface, although in retrospect Tony Montana is surely the most culturally important movie role of the past twenty-five years. (Fishscale, anyone?) This year the smart money says the Academy will finally recognize Martin Scorsese as best director, but why have they denied him before and does he deserve it for The Departed?

Let's get straight to the point: Martin Scorsese has never won an Oscar because of racism. Racism, you say? But he's white, isn't he? As in everything, it all depends on who's doing the looking. I hope we can all agree that all the racial categories of past and present are biological fictions. Their only reality is in people's minds. (If I need to explain this to you, then perhaps you're at the wrong website. Try this one instead.)

Scorsese has been nominated five times and has deserved it at least two of those times: 1980 for Raging Bull and 1990 for Goodfellas. But let's consider all five nominations and the winners :
-1980 Raging Bull (Robert Redford for Ordinary People);
-1988 The Last Temptation of Christ (Barry Levinson for Rain Man);
-1990 Goodfellas (Kevin Costner for Dances with Wolves);
-2002 Gangs of New York (Roman Polanski for The Pianist); and
-2004 The Aviator (Clint Eastwood for Million Dollar Baby).

Any group of people can be constructed by others, or by themselves, as a race, and racial identities often have hierarchies within them. Are the Irish a race? They were to many of the English who occupied their country and starved them out of it. They were to the white Americans to whose country they then emigrated. Today they're a 'nationality' or an 'ethnicity', perhaps equally imaginary categories but less susceptible to discrimination. In the twenty-first century, many Americans have racialized Muslims (a religious group) and Arabs (a language group), which only goes to show fluid and adaptable 'racial' discrimination is.

The category of 'white people' has always had its internal hierarchies in the States: there are white people, and then there are 'ethnic whites' or 'white ethnics'. For many people—consciously or unconsciously—to be an 'ethnic white' is to be white but not quite. The category usually includes Italians, Poles, Greeks—basically any European population group that is Catholic or Orthodox Christian and/or generally swarthier-complected than WASPs. To the ignorant people who care about degrees of whiteness, Jews are somehow beyond the pale. (For the record, I don't subscribe to any of this racial rubbish. I'm just trying to characterize a racist set of attitudes that one encounters in the world. I believe that racism exists but race doesn't.) (Second aside: if you ever watch Spike Lee's Jungle Fever again, pay attention to the Italian-American candy store scenes. Michael Badalucco's character explicitly talks about his ethnic envy of Robert Redford. Spike Lee knows what I'm talking about.)

Now scroll back up to the list of Scorsese's nominations. Do you see any patterns? Scorsese most deserved to win in 1980 and 1990 for New York-based films about Italian-Americans, and he was beaten both times by Redford and Costner(!), non-'ethnic' white guys making films about non-'ethnic' white people way west of New York. And Clint Eastwood? Eastwood is the icon of the stoic, no-nonsense white man of the west. Scorsese is not just Italian-American. He's also short, asthmatic, a fast-talker, and a New Yorker. In person he talks even faster than Woody Allen in Annie Hall. I'll even go one further and say that much of America, especially in the 70's and 80's, racialized New Yorkers in general. We were one big cesspool of pollution to the red-blooded, and blue-blooded, states. (Woody Allen expressed New Yorkers' internalized racism eloquently in Annie Hall: 'Don't you see? The rest of the country looks upon New York like we're left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers. I think of us that way sometimes and I live here.')

Things are getting better at the Academy and in the States generally, but the Academy has historically discriminated against Scorsese as an Italian-American, as a New Yorker, and, compared to Eastwood et al., as a non-Hollywood masculine body. It's racism and more, and it stinks. Will the Academy, as expected, right a historic wrong this year? And if Scorsese wins, will he deserve it? For the answer to the last question, tune in tomorrow for part two, tentatively titled 'Hong Kong comes to Boston'.