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Oscars season is almost upon us and it can be a curse who gets the nod from a vast committee of overwhelmingly, old, white, rich men.  Martin Scorsese became desperate to acquire the Best Director Oscar when he joined their ranks and after two misfires with Gangs of New York and The Aviator (not to mention the better films he had done previously), he was duly rewarded with the statuette for one of his weaker films, a remake that rapidly loses air like a balloon whose nozzle is released once the main antagonist dies.  But he came back with The Wold of Wall Street.  Unlike F. Murray Abraham whose career effectively died after he won Best Actor for Don Salieri in Amadeus.
So it is this year with Eddie Redmayne in the frame as most likely to grab it for his portrait of Stephen Hawking.  I saw some blurb for Last Vegas which boasted of the actorly Academy Award-winning quartet of Michael Douglas, Robert de Niro, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline.  This despite it being an atrocious movie (has Kline ever been in a good film since his award-winning turn in A Fish Called Wanda?).  Redmayne will suffer the same fate, no matter what trash he is in.  Jupiter Ascending has him playing a bog-standard Brit villain in the best Hollywood tradition, yet the DVD will wax lyrical about the presence of "Academy Award nominee/winner Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything)" as if this somehow elevates the flick to another level.  As an estate agent would varnish the truth, the copywriters know the drill and Redmayne pays off a bit more his mortgage.