Oscars
Six of the nominees, including The Wolf of Wall Street, are keeping it real
It's the phrase you hear every year at the Academy Awards: "And the Oscar goes to ..." But at this year's March 2 ceremony, there's another refrain that'll be getting plenty of attention: "Based on a true story."
Six of the nine nominees for Best Picture are about real people and real events: American Hustle, Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyers Club, Philomena, 12 Years a Slave and The Wolf of Wall Street. Hollywood has always loved fiction that's not entirely fictional, from 1928's The Patriot to now classics like 1962's Lawrence of Arabia to last year's winner Argo--but this year's race takes the truism to a new level. Even going back to the first awards in 1927, there's never been another year in which two-thirds of the films in the race were reality-based.
Leonardo DiCaprio, a Best Actor nominee for his turn as rogue stockbroker Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street, traces the trend to contemporary moviegoers who make an immediate connection when they know a story is based in reality. "Even though a writer can invent something amazing, there's always that notion that real life produces events that are more incredible than our imagination," he tells TIME. "When an audience knows that at least part of the story actually happened, they really respond." Which is why DiCaprio spent months hanging out with Belfort in preparation for the part. "I cannot tell you how much easier it is for an actor to be able to spend time with that person," he says. "You can go so much deeper into who they are, even though in the end you are going to turn them into a character."
It's the second time DiCaprio has worked on a true story with director Martin Scorsese; the first was The Aviator, for which he had to do more guesswork and research--including living with someone suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder--before playing Howard Hughes. Not to mention his earlier takes on real-life figures, such as writer Jim Carroll in The Basketball Diaries (1995) and J. Edgar Hoover in Clint Eastwood's 2011 biopic. True stories have produced such good material for DiCaprio that he and his Wolf co-star, Best Supporting Actor nominee Jonah Hill, have teamed up to work on a film based on Marie Brenner's 1997 Vanity Fair article "American Nightmare: The Ballad of Richard Jewell," about the aftermath of false allegations that the security guard bombed Atlanta's Summer Olympics.
The appeal of "based on a true story" is more than just an actor's intuition. Rick Busselle, who studies media psychology at Bowling Green State University, says that knowing a story isn't fantasy means you can't dismiss it, so "the audience finds the less extraordinary events of real life more compelling than the extra-extra-extraordinary events of fiction."
Why has this year yielded such a bumper crop of truth? Busselle hazards a guess: "Is part of it that, frankly, we're running out of good fiction ideas?" There's no way to test the theory, but anecdotal evidence is strong. Between franchises, remakes and history, there are few truly new stories in multiplexes these days. Factor in reality television and YouTube's wealth of DIY docs, and it would be easy to despair about the future of good old-fashioned imagination.