Why Leo Should Have Pushed Kate off the Door: the Curse of the Oscarless Playboy

On the whole, it is better to deserve honours and not have them than to have them and not deserve them.
- Mark Twain's Notebook, 1902-1903

Leonardo Di Caprio might have this quote taped across his wall. For the first time ever, I might give my undivided attention to at least half an hour of the Oscars, so that I shall feel it its entirety the award scene of Best Actor in a Leading Role.

Leo, and/or his monolithic swarm of fans not unlike the crowds at White Night may be hitting their heads against the wall, Arnie Grape style, trying to fathom why his trophy cabinet is missing an Oscar. His IMBD page is a 1000+-word manifesto, begging why? Why? WHY?! behind each heady, manic accolade. “A high level of dramatic versatility”, “a generation’s definition of a heartthrob”, “continues to wow audiences by refusing to conform to any cliché”. It seems, that by acting in so many hot and classy blockbusters, a few token weird leftie movies and customary underprivileged upbringing, that this Renaissance man who is also an environmentalist and fluent in German, deserves an Oscar.

I realised, after watching Wolf of Wall Street in the cinemas, that in fact many movies I choose to venture outside for, feature “the heartthrob of a generation”. Peculiar. How has he become one of my favourites? A review of my own love for Leo uses “heaps of facial expressions”, “I like the characters”, “pretty” and “same birthday” as reasoning for keen approval. As I flick through websites and images of LDC, I pick up a few patterns - tendency to date models, an absurd amount of award nominations, with a sparse few won and a penchant for acting characters with tragic endings. What is Leo’s curse? An overview of his most well known characters clearly suggests bad omens, that can be split into three themes – #Wretchedness, #Unattainable Love and even a few #Diamonds. Observe:

Romeo and Juliet: Leo as Romeo falls in love with Juliet at a party. They get married behind their arch rivalled families. Romeo is banished, Juliet fakes a suicide, planning to awake 24 hours later and elope with Romeo. Romeo believes Juliet is dead and poisons himself. #unattainablelove #wretched

Titanic: Leo the roaming artist saves Rose the rich girl from committing suicide over her arranged marriage. Jack falls in love with Rose, Rose’s fiancé frames Jack with theft of his diamond necklace engagement present, and locks him up. Rose saves Jack, but Jack dies saving Rose at sea. #wretched #unattainablelove #diamonds

Blood Diamond: Leo the gunrunner and fisherman try to smuggle a diamond out of Africa. After several hours of bloody warfare, they succeed; reach the escape helicopter with diamond, but gunrunner dies just before the helicopter leaves. #wretched #unattainablelove #diamonds

Django Unchained: Leo the malicious Mississippi plantation owner is tricked into inviting bounty hunters home. He discovers their ploy to sell his slaves to them cheap, and insists on charging the full amount. He then demands a formal handshake with the bounty hunters but is shot through the heart instead. #wretched

The Great Gatsby: Leo as Gatsby the 1920s New York businessman whose party life is all to attract his ex love Daisy. He starts an affair with Daisy, she gives him up when she finds out he’s a crook, but he doesn’t lose faith…until he gets shot by a man who mistakes him for the driver (Daisy) that hit and killed his wife. Bad. Luck. #unattainablelove #wretched #diamonds

Even more…

#unattainablelove: The Beach, The Departed, J Edgar Hoover

#wretched: The Beach, What’s Eating Gilbert Grape, The Aviator, The Departed, J Edgar Hoover

With the irrefutable logic of correlation, I predict that the Wolf of Wall Street could finally draw the curtains on one long, soliloquy of Oscarless leader roles. For the first time Leo (as Jordan Belfort the “resourceful” stockbroker) does not die, the unattainable girl takes him AND he stays out of prison, giving the FBI and token #wretchedness the finger. If Leo wins an Oscar, it could relieve him of the tacky and un-Oscarly status as a “generation’s heartthrob”, and sweating fans will need to move on to another pretty actor’s plight to be taken seriously (cue Matthew McConaughey)? I hope that the man whose characters are fixated on diamonds, unattainable love and wretchedness will see the parallels in his own eternally hopeful, Oscarless state.

Christian Bale (as Batman) glares at me from my iPhone wallpaper. Matthew McConaughey seems like a great guy, I don’t know who the hell Bruce Dern is (Wikipedia points out that I vaguely recognize him, but this is cheating I didn’t know his name to start off), and I am quite pleased with myself that I could type out Chiwetel Ejiofor’s name on first glance from Google. I’m also looking forward to Jennifer Lawrence’s last-ditch attempt at self-deprecation, while awkwardly modelling Dior (here's your chance Leo!). I hope that twice-victor Tom Hanks, thrice-victor Daniel Day-Lewis and JLaw quietly high five and sit on their own table, while the rest of them in ad breaks will crawl down the red carpet, drugged, drooling and desperate to receive their well-deserved Oscar.

Fly #10: Your New Year's Resolution is to never use the word "literally" everagain.

Babe, I’m sorry and no offence but it’s scientifically proven that society will literally think you are less nice and pretty when you use any of these words.

All of my most hated words and expressions of all time in one sentence. Microsoft Word grammar check screams in green squiggly-line protest, yet I push on, for the greater cause, to eradicate the following:

BABE/BABY

Why are you calling me a baby? If it’s meant to be you telling me that I am cute and affectionate (I am neither) can’t you just say those things? Babies are helpless and rely on the help of adults. Whenever I get called “babe” I imagine myself crawling, diaper-clad, looking up with wide sparkling eyes and a bit of drool at the larger-than-life figure in front of me. “If you call me babe, does that make you my daddy?” I never seem to get an answer from this question, because apparently me asking that is worse than being called a baby. What would suit both parties here, is if I and no one else gets called a baby at all ever.

SORRY

This word is only justifiable if you are apologising for an action that you feel responsible for, that produces remorse. If you are being polite or arguing then you are not sorry. “I’m sorry, but I think that…” – why are you apologising for having an opinion? If you are so sorry, and what you are about to say is so heinous and abrasive, don’t say it. “Sorry” in the everyday creates a self-loathing atmosphere that walks on eggshells, fears confrontation and is desperate to please. If this word is reserved only for when it’s really meant, “I’m sorry that I caused an oil spill in the Atlantic” then it will mean so much more than your apparent guilt for alerting the waiter that you’re missing a spoon.

NO OFFENCE

So cruel. This was a popular one at school, and its utterance got me mobilised to be offended in a big way. If you don’t want to cause offence then why say it at all? Why not rephrase it so that it doesn’t cause offence? Or say it, and bear the consequences of being evil.

SCIENTIFICALLY PROVEN

Slipping in the science fairy doesn’t beef up your theory, it makes you sound like a vapid fool who is seduced by that magical thing “science”. Its connotations of asexual faceless figures in white coats (potentially stormtroopers?) sparkling laboratories, and test tubes extends the myth that studies relating to science equate absolute truth. If you are saying that your shampoo cures AIDs, and here’s the study to prove it, then quote that exact study instead of spurring the forehead-smacking despair that is “scientifically proven”. Or maybe reflect on the fact that if your theory needs “scientifically proven” to not sound wrong then it probably is wrong.

SOCIETY

I twitch and tear up when “society” is quoted as a reason for self-pity or inhibition. How could one be so self-involved as to assume that all other humans in the world, who are all complex and unique, think the exact same thing as the person next to them? Society does not judge women based on their appearance, YOU judge women based on their appearance. The less you blame society for your problems, and realise that it is, in fact, your problem that you feel that way, the happier you’ll be. You can say goodbye to complaining with your mates that society is so unforgiving, when none of “society” (which I assume is anyone but you?) actually cares that you want to start cross dressing or breed exotic animals or write a book about cannibalism.

LITERALLY

This word is not ok. Leave it alone. If you want to send the message across that something extreme happened, then all you need to do is say the extreme thing. “I slept on the tram tracks”. “I literally slept on the tram tracks”. What is the difference here? I feel let down when a great author diseases their text with the festering meaningless mole that is “literally”, for it signifies that they were too lazy to express themselves properly. The pandemic overuse of Sir Literally has sucked it dry of any greater purpose to conversation, so that even when its used correctly, anyone in earshot crawls into a ball on the floor and wants it all to be over now. I give this one the award for being the most heinous, worth at least 20 societies and sorries. Delete Abort Destroy Forever.

NICE/PRETTY

World’s worst compliment. I’d rather have FAT SLUT written across my tombstone. Being “nice” or “pretty” is passive, dull, and reeks of getting the tick of approval for not taking up too much space. They belong to the same zone as the apologists, who feel guilty for existing, and again are desperate to please. It is much more satisfying, for you and receivers, to be kind or helpful or friendly or funny or interesting. These characteristics celebrate the space you occupy, and encourage outward action instead of shrinking against the wall, smiling and hoping that no-one thinks you are mean. “Pretty” is disguised as a compliment on looks, but it really rewards mostly girls for being unaware of their looks, thus reserving them for others’ pleasure rather than their own. Do pretty and nice people have fun? No. They are the source of all insecurity, of what “everyone else” is doing. No one is nice, we all do mean things, we are all ugly most of the time. When we get rid of pretty and nice, our effect on others will depend on how we use our space, rather than what it looks like (pretty) or our attempt to reduce its impact (nice).

The wrong “yours”, shitty punctuation, lyk and hashtags may be grammatically erroneous, but they are not poisonous, the way apologising unnecessarily is. Good language would be so much more powerful if the focus moved away from smug, uninteresting rules on capitalisation and toward picking up what connotations certain words have and what effect they have on your attitude. I get so much more out of saying “#yolo” than using the damned “literally”. Occupy your space with less apologetic terms and watch your problems with society magically melt away.

Fly #9: First World Fighters - My Thoughts and Muses on the Pain Game

I want to write about pain. I am in pain a lot more these days than I use to be, although instead of this being unpleasant and a ticket to the imaginary violin show it is actually a great way of knowing what I should and shouldn’t be doing. I now know that if my back hurts, I should change something, and no amount of persisting through this pain will remove an injury or be rewarding. Pain does not have to be alarming or a prelude to disaster - it is the only phone your body has to your train of thought and decision-making processes. It’s a flaw of the English language that so many types of unpleasantness all fall under the umbrella term "pain". Some learn the hard way how to discriminate productive and harmful pain. Some will suffer the long-term and debilitating pain of emotional trauma or mental illness. I’ve felt sad and hopeless and tormented at times, as much as anyone departing adolescence, but for now my first-hand experience resides in pain from injuries, exercise and hard work.

Discomfort and awkwardness is inevitable in the pursuit of your Goals and Dreams. Feeling like shit on a run, or wanting to neck yourself finishing off assignments at 4am isn’t really pain, as you once decided (even if deluded) that the benefits of the end result would outweigh any transient relief you’d get by quitting. Some of this pain isn’t the physical fatigue from exercise, but the knee-jerk negative self-talk that typically surfaces either 5 mins before work or 10 min into it. The amount of times I have taught swimming to boys and girls of all ages and heard them say, “I can’t do it!” is shocking. Why would you add even more stress to an already demanding activity? You can’t change the feeling of lactic acid or unfamiliarity to a new activity, but you most certainly don’t have to say, “I can’t do it”, just because you aren’t beach whaling on the couch, or having mum and dad do it for you. The most confident children I have ever taught are those deemed as ‘badly behaved’, or whose first language isn’t English. The beginner prep class, which has many students from both of these groups often have no concern over the very real possibility of them drowning. This provides to be a thrilling experience for me, as 12 screaming five year-olds dump their heads in the water for just enough time to come up, cough, scream, then do it again. They will rarely listen to instructions on how to hold a kickboard so as not to plunge and die. The sheer excitement of learning something new, or having no concern for boundaries would do wonders to remove the hell everyone outside the beginner prep swimming class have in persisting through hard work.

In saying this, it’s fair to say that some exercise and work is far harder than working up a sweat. During a race, or a hard ergo session, the fine feeling like you are breathing through a straw and your legs hold mini washing machines of acid is quite heinous. This, however, is not pain, it is physical and mental fatigue whose benefits outweigh the cost of feeling like shit for less than an hour unless you are very odd and do threshold exercise for more than an hour. I now know that rowing isn’t meant to be painful for your back, which I still find very confusing, and I put this down once again to confusion on word choice to describe unpleasant feelings. Rowing can be a slog in a myriad of ways, but none of these ways should involve pain. My current impression of pain, relating to my minor injury (googling pictures of broken backs and herniated discs is a humbling exercise) is the rather singular sensation that someone has turned me into a live “Operation!” game, whereby this very evil individual places those little tweezers ever so delicately on a certain spot slightly off centre in the lower back, but threw the game out to sea, so that when waves come and go the buzzing comes ON and off and ON and off. If only my body could have communicated to me in words. It could have said, “you need to stop rowing now, my name is L4-5 disc, I am already quite frail from being smashed by an oar six months ago and I won’t be happy if you row again today. I want a rest and you need to give me a rest. Or else.” I now know that this pain is not okay, but washing machine and straws are fine, and that will pipe down when I fully emerge from my indolent life to row again.

This epiphany of pain vs. necessary stress will extend only as far as me and anyone else who decides not to row or lift or hunch over when their body sends pain signals. Unfortunately, there exists a pandemic of heady discourse surrounding pain, and the shame that exists in taking it seriously. “Pain is temporary, glory is forever”. “Pain is weakness leaving the body”. These teach a dangerous attitude to pain and stress for two reasons, the first being that it encourages irresponsible, self-loathing toward exercise, the second being that you must go through something you hate or wish to stop to get what you want. When your body is at 100%, why should any training or hard work be that unpleasant? Yes, we can go back to the washing machine and straws, but surely exercise-endorphins, doing an activity with friends, the feeling of accomplishment and contributing to your long-term health and fitness outweigh stresses that you know won’t actually hurt you the way real pain does.

This is where my issue with the term, “first-world problem” comes in. Laden with the stench of middle-class guilt, it assumes that these potentially painful problems aren’t worth fixing, because their tendency to occur around monetary wealth reduces their value. Placing your problems concerning broken iPhone screens and ugly cufflinks next to those of the North Korean single teen mother doesn’t make them any less. What’s more, if you really think you need perspective, misfortune doesn’t discriminate between culture and money. Why not stick to what you know, and compare your problems to your friends instead of faceless strangers? I met a walker on crutches at the Colour Run on Sunday, who shattered his L1 vertebrae. He had been in a wheelchair for 10 weeks, and hoped to return to rock climbing in 6 months. After fracturing two vertebrae, I was back to training at full capacity in 6 weeks. Instead of complicating my problems further with the secondary guilt of someone's problems in another country, I can immediately look to the person next to me and snap out of any self-pity just fine. Both of my parents have been through back surgery for herniated discs. When I taught a kindergarten and primary school in a distant Peruvian town, the young people there were a lot less messed up than here, and they would have cared if I were upset about something. 

Pain is a legitimate and important lifeline from your body to brain, or feedback on situations whose unpleasantness transcends long-term benefit. Take it seriously, and learn to discriminate between fatigue, injury and negative self-talk. Our problems and mountains are often relative, and it sometimes helps to see the other side, but actually see it in friends and family instead of assuming that it only exists when you aren’t living with money in Australia. I can’t row, but I can do many other things. This week I’ve got an unlimited pass to a yoga studio (Barre Body! Get on it!) and I’m aiming for 15 classes. Having limitations can make you bored and pissed off, but also creative. Stop bitching and work with what you can. As Christina Aguilera once said, “After all that you put me through, you think I'd despise you, but in the end I wanna thank you, 'cause you've made me that much stronger”. Booyah. Now stop reading, get your runners on and go for a run. Or walk if you have shin splints.

Fly #8: Dear Victorian Government, it's not sexual violation, it's rape, and italways will be.

With the Victorian Government’s overhaul of rape laws reopens the always fresh wound of rape and consent opinion within the public. Discussion of rape and consent whittles down all the way to everyday interactions as we doggedly try to work out who wants to have sex with who.

From unwanted texting to rape, every action without consent is always the entire fault of the offender. I am sick of hearing from my friends that they don’t want to directly confront unwanted attention, because it would embarrass the guy. Sorry girls, but that is part of the whole game. The guy is putting himself out there, because you have every right to politely decline his interest. If he is playing, “I’m just being friendly”, it doesn’t matter, his idea of platonic friendship is weird for you, and you aren’t interested so you should probably let him know. If he is offended, that’s his fault for assuming that he could have you, he should give up and use his time elsewhere. It’s your sex, and as an adult you have complete power for the rest of your life to say yes and no to whatever you want. If you joyously participated in a bukkake one day, then the next wasn’t too keen on a guy calling you “sweetheart” at work, that is your right and completely justified. Take some power back and enjoy having ownership over your actions.

This concept of knowing and celebrating your power to say yes and no extends all the way to rape, whereby as soon as the line of consent is crossed, it’s rape and you are traumatised, no matter what situation you had put yourself in. The offender must be blamed and charged with rape, not sexual violation as what has been suggested by the rape and consent law overhaul this week. While it seems that adding the charge, “sexual violation” is a fallback and provides some solace to victims when rape cannot be charged, this confirms the fear we have of charging someone with rape. As far as I’m concerned, if any sex has occurred without consent, or where the offender has the advantage due to lack of consent, it’s rape, rape, rape, and the offender should be charged with rape. Just because the victim was drunk, or has had plenty of consensual sex drunk in the past does not make it any less of a rape case. Adults have every right to get smashed, and it does not undermine their right to speak up if something happened while drunk.

I have been in countless situations, drunk and sober, where I would have been “at risk” of being raped. But I never have. When I was 19 at Falls Festival, I celebrated New Year’s Eve with vodka-filled water bottles, and woke up alone on a mattress of a stranger’s car, fully clothed, bag with phone and money intact. When I was 20, I travelled Europe largely alone for a month, and enjoyed wandering small towns and big cities alone, day and night. On one particular night after a pub crawl with male hostel friends met that night, I woke up on the floor of a random hotel room with a group of British tourists. No rape, nothing. I will, at least once a week, walk home in the city in the dark alone, and one of those times was once in the small hours wearing an Australian flag and bikini as appropriate attire for an Anything But Clothes party on Exhibition St. I hardly got a weird look, let alone unwanted sexual attention. I am entitled to walk wherever I like, wearing whatever I like, in whatever state I like. It is shameful, that we have accepted that the streets at night are unsafe. It is shameful, that some are too afraid to be alone at night in the city, and choose to go out of their way to avoid that situation. Why should we negotiate with terrorists? What’s more, why should we pin rape to the male psyche, and assume all men are capable, when it has nothing to do with “boys being boys” and everything to do with choice? Men are not by nature vicious ruthless sexual psychos, and the few that are have nothing to do with other men. And don’t even think the word, “testosterone”, people aren’t slaves to their hormones to the point that they rape someone - if they break this rule, they need to be locked up forever.

I am not lucky for avoiding rape in any of the above situations, plus quite a few more that I have been in. I did not expect anything to happen, because I don’t expect men to rape me, just like I don’t expect the girl on the tram to open fire. When these things do happen, it isn’t inevitable, it is horrific and is a bloodstain on a species that can and always will have the ability to choose. Not only is it a horrible insult to all men, to assume that they can’t control themselves, it also excuses such bad behaviour under that revolting archaic, boys will be boys slogan, traditionally attributed to schoolboys playing in the mud, also seemingly applicable to a college gang rape. There is no such thing as sexual violation, the victim will not be half-traumatised from a "half-rape”. It’s all the same thing, and once you cross the barrier of foregoing consent every single action is rape and you should be charged with doing so. Even if she was a prostitute. Even if she was wearing a bikini and Australian flag at 4am alone in the middle of the city.

If you rape someone, it is not because you are a man. It is because you are a rapist. You made the greatest error of judgment possible, short of actually murdering someone. Some, in fact, would prefer to die than be raped. Leave sexual violation and men out of it.