9. Martin Scorsese - The Wolf of Wall Street
There probably is no more a legendary director working in the film business today than Martin Scorsese. Francis Ford Coppola has never been able to regain his peak form post-Apocalypse Now, George Lucas sold out his artistic cred a long time ago, and Steven Spielberg still has Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull to answer for, which leaves Scorsese the most unscathed of his peers. In fact, in terms of his success with the Academy, Scorsese is really in the prime of his career. The iconic director has been nominated for the Best Director award a total of seven times. Of these seven nominations, four have come since the dawn of the new millennium (the three previous nominations being for Goodfellas, The Last Temptation of Christ, and Raging Bull, as inexplicably, he was not nominated for Taxi Driver, possibly the worst omission in the history of the Oscars), so to say he has been on a role with the Academy lately is quite an understatement. Out of all his feature films since the year 2000, only Shutter Island was shut out of both the Best Director and Best Picture categories. It doesn't take an individual with an especially high ID then to figure out that Scorsese's newest film, The Wolf of Wall Street, will likely end up in the 2014 awards conversation. The Wolf of Wall Street is based on the autobiography of the same name by Jordan Belfort. Belfort was a successful stockbroker during the tech boom of the 1990's and he lived his life to excess until it all came crashing down on him when the FBI came a-knocking at his door. Frequent Scorsese collaborator Leonardo DiCaprio will star as Belfort, while a string of other excellent actors such as Matthew McConaughey, Jonah Hill, and Jean Dujardin are set to make appearances as well. The film's script was written by Terrance Winter, the show-runner of the excellent HBO series Boardwalk Empire, of which Scorsese is an executive producer on, so all the pieces are set for an excellent, awards-friendly movie. With the pedigree of the people involved and the choice subject matter of the film, it would really be more of a shock if Scorsese didn't get nominated for Best Director than if he did. Sight unseen, I would still say his chances of a nomination are probably at least 60%. If Scorsese does manage to get the Best Director nomination, it will be quite the historic one, because it would tie him with the legendary Billy Wilder as the second most nominated director in Oscar history. And who knows, if Scorsese still has another good decade left in him, he may even surpass William Wyler's record for the most Best Director nominations (12).