Updated Thursday evening: It’s hardly sticking my neck out to say that Martin Scorsese‘s The Irishman will definitely be Best Picture nominated, and that it’s looking like the odds-on favorite to win. Because apart from the story being about Robert De Niro‘s Frank Sheeran taking a long, hard look at his life, it’s also a Scorsese sum-upper — a kind of “who am I and what have I accomplished?” movie, the fifth and final Scorsese gangster flick that will assess the previous four (Goodfellas, The Departed, Mean Streets, Casino) along with itself, and issue a late-in-life assessment of the moral, ethical and aesthetic meat of the matter. Half street saga, half melancholy elegy. A cinematic equivalent. if you will, of Frank Sinatra‘s “It Was A Very Good Year.”
