I have gone through this before, but again, as a hardcore, longtime, die hard megafan of Marty Scorsese I find
The Departed to be in the bottom third of his filmography quality-wise and therefore frustrated that it was the movie that finally got him his Best Director Oscar. It is not terribly unusual for the Academy to reward somebody later in their career for lesser work. For one with a Scorsese connection, there's Paul Newman. To a movie fan who isn't up on Oscar trivia, to find that Paul Newman won an Oscar is not at all surprising. But then if you asked them which performance he won for you'd likely get guesses of
Cool Hand Luke, Hud, The Verdict, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting, The Hustler, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and maybe even
Slap Shot before you would have to tell them nope, it was for
The Color of Money. Newman is not bad in that film, at all. He's quite good. He's usually quite good. He's Paul frickin' Newman. But were it not for the fact that he won his belated Oscar for
The Color of Money it is not a performance that he would be linked to very strongly.
And that is
The Departed, for this Scorsese fan. It's not a bad movie, certainly. It just isn't objectively one of his five or so best (for me I rank it twentieth). But it
is the one that got him that Oscar. That Marty didn't win for
Raging Bull, The Last Temptation of Christ, GoodFellas, Gangs of New York, The Aviator, Hugo, The Wolf of Wall Street, or
The Irishman and wasn't even nominated for
Taxi Driver, The Age of Innocence, Silence, The King of Comedy or
Casino but won for
The Departed.... Honestly and truly I would rather he had never won at all and remain forever in the ranks of Hitchcock, Kubrick, Altman, Lumet, and every great foreign language director who ever lived as brilliant filmmakers who never won Best Director at the Academy Awards than to have him win for
The Departed. Like Newman's win, in fifty years and to more casual fans they will assume he won for one of his bona fide classics.
But hey, people love it, so whatareyougonnado? It did fall completely off of the MoFo All Time 100 reboot, which was my happiest surprise of that particular countdown (for the record
GoodFellas was #3 there,
Taxi Driver #14, and
Raging Bull #49). I knew of course
The Departed would remain on this list, but at least it slipped a little.
As for
Shaun of the Dead I love that movie but it is Top 50 for me, not Top 25, and thus not on my ballot. Very glad to see it make the collective list and happily surprised by how high it got. Gives me hope that
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World will place well in the eventual 2010-2019 countdown (start the early campaigning now).