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

3. He Carries The Movie (He Should)

A criticism that has been leveled against The Wolf of Wall Street is that it didn't need to be three hours to get its point across, but that's the point. Do we need eight different office party scenes to understand the debauchery of Wall Street brokers? No, but did they need to waste $2 million on a single soiree? As Elvira Hancock says in Scarface, "Nothing exceeds like excess." In order to be overcome by the consistency of the bad behavior in the film, we get scene after scene of similar set-ups and pay-offs, but despite the repetition in the narrative we aren't bored by the goings on. This is in no small part due to the performance by DiCaprio. In 12 Years a Slave we understand who Solomon Northup is through his interaction with other slaves. In Nebraska, Bruce Dern's old fogey is definitely the primary character in that he drives the narrative and he is who audiences are drawn to, but the film asks you to take the perspective of his put-upon son played by Will Forte. In The Wolf of Wall Street, we are forced to learn who Belfort is through his sheer force of personality. Keeping our attention throughout its long run-time relies on DiCaprio's performance to truly involve the audience as he is in almost every scene. Again, I'm not saying that DiCaprio's performance is definitively better than Chiwetel Ejiofor's or Bruce Dern's, but that his character functions as the sole focal point. The film's success is thus tied directly to DiCaprio's ability to entertain us, and he certainly does that.