seriously, has there ever been a more appropriate moment for that word popularized by everyone’s 2012 olympic boyfriend ryan lochte?

JEAH!

and lo, this became an impossibility…

let’s take stock…

i never thought i’d be applauding the mail for diversity in word choice but the phrase “long-overdue” looks innovative in this context, given the fact that it seems to have been a requirement of every headline writer in the world that the word “finally” be included in the announcement of dicaprio’s win.

it is used with such frequency that i wonder if we have lost touch with the meaning of this word…

given that the idea that dicaprio was due an oscar arose in 2014…

as ET pointed out, after his loss for wolf of wall street, the internet collectively decided his Time had come…

so by “FINALLY,” what we mean is the period from 2 march 2014 to 28 february 2016.

by “FINALLY,” we are referring to a 728 day span of time wherein the world had decided leo should have an oscar and wherein he did not.

728 days. only 88 days longer than an elephant pregnancy and 367 days shorter than the duration of my phd program.

if days were pages, leo’s wait would be approximately only half the length of margaret  mitchell’s gone with the wind.

by which i mean, NOT A LOT OF TIME HAS PASSED.

of course, the way this is being tabulated is from his first nomination in 1994 to now. so leo has been waiting for TWENTY-TWO years, ever since he was a pipsqueak.

that is why he is being likened to susan lucci. it’s the duration of the waiting rather than the chances for a win.

please note how, nearly 17 years after her win, susan lucci is STILL the patron saint of People Who Take a Long Time To Win Things. (also, please appreciate that writing about leo this oscar season has now led to the creation of a “susan lucci” category for this blog.)

in thinking about culture and the movement of stories in culture, i tend to argue that we get the narratives we need and apparently, in a world where donald trump is running for president, we really really really need jack dawson to win an academy award.

which is… interesting.

the man himself seems pretty zen.

he’s not holding on to it for dear life or anything so that’s pretty good.

and i’m 99.9% certain the hysteria around his win will die down by the end of this week- if super tuesday hasn’t already blown it out of the news cycle.

so what was that all about? why did it seem to matter so much there for those few weeks?

in part, it was because dicaprio himself was campaigning HARD for the last two months. but we seem to have wanted it pretty hard for him as well.

i do wonder if this wasn’t something to do with the more general cultural resurgence of the 1990s which we appear to be in the midst of.

had i not just spent years looking at 50s nostalgia in the 1970s, i might go, HAHAHAHA, oline, you’re being a loon. but i’ve seen that this is how stories work, so i think there’s some validity to what i’m suggesting here.

several weeks ago, a friend sent me a new yorker article that likened american crime story: the people vs. oj simpson to a “a tasty Proustian cronut that makes you remember the events of not only 1995 but 2015.”

an UH-MAZING metaphor and sentence, which beautifully captures our connection to so many of these things and the dynamic that also, i believe, lies at the heart of the leo narrative this oscar season. if not for dicaprio himself then certainly for us.

the connection we feel to him in the present, often harkens back to the past.

so that he is himself a proustian cronut- a connection between the present and past, both ours and his…

i’ve written about this before but it’s worth quoting because it is, i think, so essential to the way that we feel about celebrities we have been watching for a long time…

watching titanic with croftie the other day, just the introductory music was enough to bring a nostalgic tear to our eyes. we recalled sitting in backseats on long vacation rides, sniffling to james horner’s plaintive notes and wiping our eyes on flannel shirtsleeves. we remembered thinking my life is so tragic– though we couldn’t recall why and we’re pretty sure it wasn’t.