Our final Best Picture nominee is The Wolf of Wall Street.
What I’m doing is posting my five favorite moments from each of the Best Picture nominees. It’s a nice way to take a break from all the Oscar stuff to remind myself (and all of us) that once you take away all the competition and the awards, what we’re left with is great cinema. That’s what it’s about.
Here are my favorite moments from The Wolf of Wall Street:
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5. Matthew. McConaughey.
“How the fuck else are we supposed to do this job? Cocaine and hookers, my friend.”
He steals this entire movie in its first half hour. I think we all agree on this. The chant, the “fugaze, fugaze, it’s a wazy, it’s a woozie” — he’s so good, and so memorable. He’s so good that after he left, I thought for sure that he was coming back. And after about twenty minutes I realized, “Oh, he’s not coming back. That’s it.” And it made me upset for a minute. Because he was so good that I wanted more of him. (He’s also so good that if he did have more of a part in the story, he probably would have gotten double nominations this year.)
I also sincerely hope he calls masturbating “feeding the geese” all the time.
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4. Jonah Hill.
He’s the reason I forgot about McConaughey. I kept waiting for McConaughey to come back, realized he wasn’t, then was sad. And then Jonah Hill showed up. The moment he jumps on screen, he replaces McConaughey. His first scene is him quitting his job, then talking about how he married his cousin (“If someone else is gonna fuck my cousin, it’s gonna be me.”), then he gets DiCaprio to smoke crack. And it just goes from there. He’s so fucking good in this movie.
Put it this way — I’m someone who couldn’t understand how he got nominated for Moneyball, and here, I’m voting for him to win. He’s so good here. It’s the single best supporting performance of the year, in my mind.
And yes, the sides actually did cure cancer. That’s why they were so expensive.
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3. The speech at the end.
DiCaprio is so good here. He takes it to so many levels, and does something few actors ever do — he goes low. He gets quiet. Nobody embraces silence and quiet, it seems. He’s so good here. It’s a great moment. This is a man who was given a perfect out — get out now, you avoid prison, you avoid all the problems you were certain to run into… and he doesn’t take it. He talks himself out of it. It’s a great moment, perfectly portrayed by DiCaprio.
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2. The Quaaludes Sequence
It’s comedic genius. You’d think this would be my number one, and it almost was, but you all know how I don’t like to go for the obvious. This sequence though is so goddamn funny. DiCaprio getting down those steps and into his car — my god. The whole thing just has you laughing your ass off. So good. And Scorsese isn’t exactly known for comedy, either. Which makes it even more impressive.
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1. “The last time.”
This moment, and the ensuing fight, is so powerful. They do a lot of it single-take, which enhances it all. The two of them — DiCaprio and Robbie — are at the top of their respective games, and it’s a really great moment, capped off with this, “the last time.” It’s so powerful, and sad, and perfectly representative of a lot of things in this movie, specifically their relationship and the rise and fall of Jordan Belfort. Love this moment.
Image may be NSFW.
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