5 Reasons Leonardo DiCaprio Should Win Best Actor Oscar This Year (And 5 Reasons Why He Won't)

4. The Speeches (He Should)

In order to play an ultra-charismatic guy who through the sheer force of his personality illegally profited at the hands of thousand unwitting investors, you have to be an actor who believes in your own charisma. That's a quality that goes unmentioned in most commentary about DiCaprio's acting, his occasionally cocky attitude actually positively impacts his performance. In The Wolf of Wall Street this can be seen clearly in the speeches he gives to rally the troops at Stratton. In the climactic speech he delivers (SPOILERS) when he reneges on his agreement to stop working in the financial industry after a deal with the SEC, DiCaprio/Belfort gives the performance of a lifetime. During the course of the speech he seems to convince himself that he is invincible, that the rules don't apply to him, all while providing his loyal troops with the type of encouragement you see from football coaches at the end of sports movies. DiCaprio is uniquely fitted to give this speech because he seems like the type of person who could be moved by his own sizable sway. This is another way of saying that DiCaprio incorporates positive and negative aspects of his personality in order to fuel his performance, taking from different sources to sublimate his role as multi-layered, engrossing, and believable.