8 Miscast Movie Roles That Received A Bizarre Amount Of Praise

3. Leonardo DiCaprio - The Aviator

Watching Leonardo DiCaprio dominating the screen in the recent The Wolf of Wall Street only serves to remind us that this guy can really, really act when he's given the right part - talented though he is, however, finding a part that suits him often proves more difficult than one might imagine. That's to say, you could certainly argue that DiCaprio has been miscast in absolutely every Martin Scorsese picture up until The Wolf of Wall Street. Though he feels at odds with his character in Gangs of New York, it's in The Aviator that he feels even more out of place. Which is to say, DiCaprio was wrong for The Aviator and for Howard Hughes in so many ways: despite the fact that the age difference felt iffy as the movie carried across the years, DiCaprio spends much of the movie in a sort of whiny haze that he presumably perfected whilst shooting The Beach. Looking back on The Aviator, it's clear that the movie is one of Martin Scorsese's weaker and more flabby efforts - in a lot of ways it's an unremarkable picture masquerading as a remarkable one. A description that works, too, for DiCaprio's performance, in fact. The Praise: A Golden Globe win, and an Oscar nomination for Best Actor? Both felt somewhat forced - almost as if the subject matter automatically warranted their existence.