Oscars 2004: If We Picked the Winners (Best Actor)

2. Leonardo DiCaprio - The Aviator When Leonardo DiCaprio became "king of the world" and the heart-throb of pre-teen and teenage girls across the world with the mega-success of Titanic, I really took a strong disliking to the young actor. It wasn't just all the celebrity and fame of his pretty boy image that made despise the object of young female obsession, but I genuinely questioned his proficiency as an actor. Today, DiCaprio is probably my favorite actor currently working, so what changed? It was a slow process that took time and multiple good performances as reassurance that he was the real deal, and a key piece of this puzzle was his performance as Howard Hughes in The Aviator, his second collaboration with famed auteur Martin Scorsese. Now my hard-line anti-DiCaprio stance had already softened a bit due to the actor's underrated performance in Steven Spielberg's most underrated film, Catch Me If You Can, but one performance does not make a trend. For all I knew, Spielberg may have had worked his black magic voodoo on DiCaprio to pull out one great performance. These fears were put to rest with a second great performance in a row with The Aviator. Howard Hughes had one of the more interesting lives of any human beings in the early 20th century. While never quite amassing the same level of power as the industrialists tycoons of the generation before him (people like J.P Morgan, Andrew Carnegie, and John Rockerfeller), Howard Hughes had the same entrepreneurial spirit as his innovative predecessors, and what he lacked in business savvy, he made up for with perseverance and a love of glamour, as his attraction to Hollywood starlets showed. This spirit, of a man who can conquer anything and anyone, and then later a man who is ironically conquered by his own unique eccentricities, is what makes DiCaprio's performance so strong. These were giant men with larger-than-life personalities in the early days of modern corporations, and to capture this without walking over the edge of typical histrionics is no small feat. To be fair, like Jamie Foxx, there are scenes in the movie that feel like simple mimicry and imitation, to prove that DiCaprio can play the part, but the exact reason that I ranked DiCaprio ahead of Foxx, is he is able to breakthrough these weaknesses to get us to some meaningful spot in the character's development. Having Martin Scorsese as your guide I am sure is a big help, but it was still on DiCaprio's shoulders to get the job done, and while he didn't quite make it to the level to have me put him at the number 1 spot, he still passed the test with flying colors.