LEO'S LATE BLOOM

Leonardo DiCaprio didn’t win a Best Actor Oscar on Sunday, but his lower-key third act is proving to be more interesting and confounding than his earlier work, writes Xan Brooks

- Xan Brooks

It is a brutal Darwinian environment, Oscar night, where a seat number dictates a guest’s status in life and the elite are ruthlessly divided into winners and losers. Everyone’s equal on the nominee’s list until the moment that the envelope is opened, at which point, forget it, they’re bystanders or roadkill. Take Leonardo DiCaprio - the headline star of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another - who had nothing to do on Sunday evening except sit and clap and occasionally twitch his matinee idol moustache. Even to his closest collaborator, the actor was an afterthought. "I really blew it when I won the Best Director award," Anderson confessed just before the ceremony wrapped up. "I forgot to thank my cast."

For DiCaprio, perhaps, this was a case of life imitating art. In One Battle After Another, he played lowly Bob Ferguson, a onetime leftist activist turned paunchy middle-aged dad. Bob is both forgetful and forgettable, the obvious third or fourth choice for any gig, and nevermind how much time he actually spends on the screen. He shuffles through the film in a plaid dressing gown as though he’s just rolled out of bed and hasn’t yet got his bearings.

Anderson’s film proved to be the big winner at the Academy Awards. It scooped prizes for Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay, together with a Best Supporting Actor gong for Sean Penn’s showboating turn as a clownish fascist soldier. Whereas Ferguson remained part of the scenery, simultaneously central and peripheral. It was as though DiCaprio embodied the man so perfectly that he made his own performance seem superfluous.