The movie got a Best Picture nomination (losing to Rocky) — as well as nominations for Robert De Niro and Jodie Foster (Best Actor and Supporting Actress) and for Bernard Herrmann’s creepy score — but its gifted director was ignored. Like Hieronymus Bosch working with spray paint, Martin Scorsese visualized a Manhattan hellscape with steam, blood and vomit everywhere, and in the center a crazed cabbie who literally gets away with murder. By rights, Scorsese could have been nominated three times in the ’70s: for Mean Streets and Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore as well as Taxi Driver. But America’s most astute and passionate picturemaker had to wait until 2007, and The Departed, to get a Best Director statuette. By then it might as well have been a lifetime-achievement award — or the Academy’s public apology for more than 30 years of myopic calls against him.
