PHOTO:The wait finally pays off, as Leonardo DiCaprio Finally Gets His Oscar!! congratulations to him..
The
41-year-old actor chased down that dish of raw bison liver with a Best Actor
trophy for his rugged performance in The Revenant, a win that was expected and
yet still satisfying based on the miles DiCaprio has had to travel to get to
the podium. Not that he complained about the wait.
“Thank you all so very much,” he told the crowd, which had risen to its collective feet for a standing ovation. “Thank you to the Academy, thank you to all of you in this room.”
DiCaprio’s quest for Oscar gold began way back in 1994, when he emerged from a career as a child actor on sitcoms like Growing Pains and Parenthood to earn accolades and a Supporting Actor nomination for his memorable performance as a developmentally disabled teen in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape.
He lost that award to Tommy Lee
Jones in The Fugitive, and wound up waiting another decade to climb back into
the awards conversation. (He famously missed out on a Best Actor nomination for
James Cameron’s Oscar-sweeping 1996 weepie Titanic, although his co-star and
off-screen buddy, Winslet, received a nod.)
He returned to
the ranks of Oscar nominees in 2005 for The Aviator, his sophomore
collaboration with Martin Scorsese.
He watched that statue go to Jamie Foxx for
Ray and remained in the audience again two years later when Forest
Whitaker’s Last King of Scotland performance triumphed over his own in Blood
Diamond.
Perhaps the hardest loss came two years ago, when DiCaprio’s turbo-charged
star turn in The Wolf of Wall Street couldn’t power its way past Matthew
McConaughey in Dallas Buyers Club. (He was also nominated — and lost — as
a producer on Wolf of Wall Street.)
As a reward for
suffering through all those losses (and The Revenant’s famously tortured
production), Oscar voters decided it was DiCaprio’s time. And the actor was as
gracious in victory as he was in his defeats, taking care to thank his fellow
nominees off the top before paying homage to co-star Tom Hardy and director
Alejandro González Iñárritu.
“To my brother in this endeavor, Mr. Tom Hardy.
Your fierce talent onscreen can only be surpassed by your friendship
off-screen.” And commenting on Iñárritu’s historic back-to-back win, he
remarked, “You have forged your way into history these past two years.”
DiCapro went on
to honor some of the other key collaborators in his life, including Martin
Scorsese and his manager, Rick Yorn. But the most dramatic moment came towards
the end of his speech, when he spoke forcefully about a cause that’s long been
near and dear to his heart: climate change.
“The Revenant was about a man’s
relationship to the natural world, a world that we collectively felt in 2015 as
the hottest year in recorded history. Our production needed to move to the
southern tip of this planet just to be able to find snow.Climate change is
real. It is happening right now.
It is the most urgent threat facing our entire
species, and we need to work collectively together and stop procrastinating. I
thank you all for this amazing award tonight. Let us not take this planet for
granted. I do not take tonight for granted.”
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