20 Years On, ‘The Departed’ Remains Scorsese’s Only Personal Oscar Win

Balle Balle Radio™ Entertainment Desk

Martin Scorsese’s "The Departed" premiered at the Ziegfeld Theatre in New York on September 26, 2006, and turns 20 this year. The anniversary lands on the same date the film first opened, and it’s the awards run that followed months later which still defines how the film is remembered.

"The Departed" claimed four Academy Awards at the 79th ceremony held on February 25, 2007, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Film Editing, and Best Adapted Screenplay. This marked Scorsese’s first directorial Oscar after receiving five previous nominations that went unrewarded. He had been nominated for "Raging Bull," "The Last Temptation of Christ," "Goodfellas," "Gangs of New York," and "The Aviator" before "The Departed" finally earned him the statue.

When accepting the award, Scorsese humorously remarked that he had won because "this is the first movie I’ve done with a plot.", according to remarks he’s made about the film. The line has followed the film’s legacy ever since, showing up in retrospectives whenever the anniversary comes around.

The film’s road to that stage started years earlier. In January 2003, Warner Bros. Pictures and producers Brad Grey and Brad Pitt acquired the rights to remake the 2002 Hong Kong film Infernal Affairs from Media Asia Entertainment Group, paying $1.75 million. Screenwriter William Monahan built the Frank Costello character around Whitey Bulger at Jack Nicholson’s request, aiming for something outside the usual gangster-film mold. Shooting began in April 2005 on a $90 million budget, with much of the interior work filmed in New York rather than Boston for tax and logistical reasons, before the film’s premiere roughly a year and a half later.

Two months before the Oscars, the film picked up a Best Director win for Scorsese at the 64th Golden Globe Awards on January 15, 2007, out of six nominations total. Critically, the reception had already been strong: a 91% positive score across 285 Rotten Tomatoes reviews, an 85 out of 100 on Metacritic, and a four-star review from Roger Ebert, who credited Scorsese with distinguishing the remake thematically from its source material.

The film earned $291.5 million globally, with $132.4 million coming from the U.S. and Canadian markets., and opened at $26.9 million domestically — good enough to make it the fourth Scorsese film to debut at number one at the box office.

Studio CarryOnHarry’s take: what stands out isn’t just that Scorsese finally won, but how long the wait had been by then — five nominations across three decades before the Academy recognized a director whose body of work had already been reshaping American film since the 1970s.

Read more People’s Choice stories on Studio CarryOnHarry. Reporting via Live News Vault.

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