The debauched tale of Jordan Belfort’s rise and fall has prompted a lot of controversy.
But “The Wolf of Wall Street,†the Martin Scorsese movie based on Mr.Belfort’s memoir of the same name, has garnered five Academy Award nominations, including for best picture. Beyond the big prize, the film also collected nominations for:
- best director, for Mr. Scorsese
- best actor, for Leonardo DiCaprio
- best supporting actor, for Jonah Hill
- best adapted screenplay, for Terence Winter
That’s on top of Mr. DiCaprio winning a Golden Globe award for best actor on Sunday night.
Though the five nominations are a fraction of the 10 nods that “American Hustle†and “Gravity†each collected, that “Wolf of Wall Street†received any at all is surprising to some. (The movie was up for only two Golden Globe awards.)
As Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply note in The New York Times, the film “was one of the year’s most divisive pictures because of its depiction of sex and drug use that pushed the boundaries of the R rating.â€
Beyond that, the film has been criticized for glorifying the boozy, drugged-out excess that Mr. Belfort describes in his book, as well as for ignoring the plight of the victims of his scheme. The former federal prosecutor Joel M. Cohen wrote in Another View:
In the film, behind Mr. Belfort and Mr. DiCaprio is a large sign advertising the name of Mr. Belfort’s real motivational speaking company. I suppose the filmmakers’ point is that there perpetually remain audiences for fraudulent scams.
But there are consequences for blurring the lines too much. The real Belfort story still includes thousands of victims who lost hundreds of millions of dollars that they never will be repaid. This began with bogus scripts that Mr. Belfort personally wrote for his legion of brokers to use against them.
