‘The Revenant’ and ‘The Hateful Eight’: How Much Blood and Guts Will Oscar Voters Endure?
by Stephen Galloway
Courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox
Leonardo DiCaprio’s epic (featuring a brutal, gory assault by a bear) and Quentin Tarantino’s latest are set to test audience’s appetites for filmmaking as violent as it is visionary.
A frontiersman is impaled through the head by an arrow. A bear rips the flesh off Leonardo DiCaprio’s back. And then DiCaprio dives off a cliff on a horse, eviscerates the dead beast and scoops out the guts so that he can take shelter in its carcass.
Think these scenes from Alejandro G. Inarritu’s The Revenant (about a 19th century frontiersman who endures appalling conditions as he tracks down the fellow who has betrayed him) might be a bit much for the faint of heart? The Fox and Regency film isn’t alone in stretching voters’ appetite for gore. In Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, a bullet blasts a man’s head to pieces, while a woman (Jennifer Jason Leigh) gets slapped around so much that it isn’t quite clear if all her teeth remain.
These two major movies will attempt to out-do each other in the brutality stakes this awards season — and just how willing Oscar voters are to tolerate their extremes may go a long way toward determining whether they emerge as frontrunners in this year’s extraordinarily heated competition.