The Oscars 2020 proved the cement shoes for Netflix’s “The Irishman.”

The downturn began on Jan. 6, when viewers tuned into the 2020 Golden Globe Awards expecting to hear a few familiar names: Marty, Pesci or perhaps Pacino. The Hollywood icons were seated at a table smack-dab down front, stage right, so it would be easy for the living legends to take the stage at the Beverly Hilton Hotel quickly when they inevitably won. But those seats would only become warmer and warmer as the night went on, because instead we heard different people called up: Sam Mendes, Brad Pitt and, most improbably, “1917.”

“The Irishman,” which began as the season front-runner, had been unceremoniously offed by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. But that was only the wild-and-crazy Globes, right? Wrong. It was everyone. None of the major industry award-granting bodies — the Producers Guild, Screen Actors Guild, Writers Guild or Directors Guild — sided with Martin Scorsese’s Netflix film, instead largely showering love on “1917,” a late entry about WWI, and the South Korean film “Parasite,” which went on to win the Best Picture Oscar.


That streak continued at the Oscars on Sunday at the Dolby Theatre, where “The Irishman” lost all 10 of its Academy Award nominations.

What went wrong? How did Scorsese’s sprawling film go from a critical darling that blanketed Times Square with domination-asserting ads and was seemingly watched by everyone … to being a giant Oscar loser?

The first bad omen was its first major accolade. The New York Film Critics Circle Awards kicks off award season yearly in January with a starry red carpet and powerful speeches. But my esteemed critic colleagues, more often than not, don’t share the taste of the academy. In the past decade, the NYFCC best film and Oscar Best Picture have overlapped just once — for “The Artist” in 2011. That’s not a great track record, and a dubious start.

Another more common issue “The Irishman” faced that has also dinged recent crash-and-burners such as “A Star Is Born” and “La La Land” was too much buzz too soon. Many pundits, including me, predicted the Frank Sheeran-Jimmy Hoffa biopic would win the moment we witnessed its premiere at the New York Film Festival. But audiences and voters get exhausted by formalities, and resent proclamations. They moved on.

Also pundits oversold voters’ historical love for this genre, and, indeed, this creative team. Many were wrong about the success of mob flicks at Oscars gone by. Since 1950, just five movies that prominently feature the Mafia, directly or tangentially, have won the Best Picture Oscar: “On the Waterfront,” “The Godfather,” “The Sting,” The Godfather Part II” and “The Departed,” which was also directed by Scorsese. “Goodfellas” and “The Godfather Part III” both lost to “Dances With Wolves.” In fact, more musicals have won Best Picture in the past 70 years than mob movies have.

Meanwhile, Scorsese has won just one Best Director Oscar in nine nominations, for “The Departed” in 2007. Pacino has also won once in nine nods, in 1993 for “Scent of a Woman.” And Pesci has taken home a sole Academy Award for “Goodfellas” in 1991, with a total of three lifetime nods. Hardly sure-thing numbers.

And then there’s the length. At 3½ hours, “The Irishman” is the longest studio movie of the decade. Show opener Chris Rock even made a crack about it, saying he loved “the first season of ‘The Irishman.'” And while the run-time was a boon to epic storytelling, harkening back to classic films, it’s taxing to modern attention spans. Speaking from experience, it’s a more effective film in a theater where your attention isn’t divided than on a couch with a laptop. But that’s how most voters and audiences saw it.

And so, by the time we arrived at Oscars night, “The Irishman” wasn’t so much a dark horse as a dead one.

With Scorsese being 77 years old, it’s easy to think these are the twilight years of his career. But let’s hold out that for the still-brilliant director, he may have another Oscar win in him.


Ref;nypost.com