WTI Magazine #77    2016 March 18
Author : Edoardo Peretti      Translation by:

"Non essere cattivo" by Claudio Caligari, the beautiful Italian movie selected to represent our country for the Oscar as "Foreign Language Film", didn't get the nomination. Despite this, the Oscar ceremony spoke Italian: the Oscar for best soundtrack has been won by Ennio Morricone, for the music of "The Hateful Eight" by a talented Italian American, Quentin Tarantino (a movie unjustly ignored by the Academy for the other nominations).

A bit of tricolor has also colored the victory of the Italian American Leonardo DiCaprio, who has spent his whole career so close that he could almost smell it, so that the "Oscar curse" on the talented actor had become a slogan. Then, it's a shame that the jury didn't give the Oscar in the category of Best Supporting Actor to another Italian American icon, Sylvester Stallone, who was running for an almost miraculous Oscar with another interpretation of his iconic character, the boxer Rocky, in "Creed". The Oscar would have been a proper recognition for his career, that he ennobled in recent years even in environments that are not particularly related to his kind of cinema, thanks to the more melancholy tone with which Sly has reread his characters and his mask in the light of past years and decades.

We already talked last month about the Master Ennio Morricone, retracing his career and his achievements. For the eighty-eight years old composer this is the first Oscar, excluding the celebratory one conferred to his career nine years ago: better late than never, considering that often the honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement is a compensation for directors and authors ignored by the Academy. It would have been an injustice or a paradox if the flourishing career of the Master had missed an Oscar for his specific job. In this case the Gods of cinema have restored justice.

The soundtrack composed for the Tarantino movie (inspired, among other things, by the music that the same Morricone had composed in 1982 for John Carpenter's The Thing, not by chance because Carpenter's film is one of Tarantino's inspirations) is perfect in enhancing the sense of unease and gloom, before latent and as more and more explicit : and it plays with great skill with melodies that recall either the western and the horror tradition, the two genres particularly dear to Tarantino. Morricone's music is among the most interesting and successful assets of «The Hateful Eight», very important for the ultimate success of the film. Moreover, among the many qualities of Quentin Tarantino there is precisely to enhance the soundtracks of his films.

In addition to the Oscar, this month gave another important satisfaction to Morricone: a few days before the ceremony, in fact, he joined the group of the "Walk Of Fame" celebrities, getting his own personal star in the most famous sidewalk in Hollywood.

In conclusion, the first Oscar won by Ennio Morricone is yet another confirmation that often, although there are no Italian films, the value of our cinema and above all of our workers and our craftsmen is recognized by nominations and victories in technical categories. Last year the costume designer Milena Canonero won the fourth Oscar; in 2013 Dario Maranelli was nominated for Best Soundtrack for «Anna Karenina» ; while in 2012 Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo won for the Best Production Design of «Hugo Cabret», the same year in which the touching animated short movie «La Luna» by Enrico Casarosa for Pixar was nominated for Best Animated Short Film. All of these are demonstrations of how our talent and our taste is widely recognized by international productions and by the greatest filmmakers.