| On Tuesday, Martin Scorsese surpassed Steven Spielberg when he earned his tenth Oscar nomination for Best Director, the most of any living filmmaker. (William Wyler, who directed such classics as “Mrs. Miniver” and “Ben-Hur,” received more.) Scorsese claimed his latest nomination for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” which he adapted from a best-selling book by the New Yorker staff writer David Grann. Scorsese had received a mere five Oscar nominations when he was profiled in the magazine, in March of 2000. Then fifty-seven, the director was arguably the most influential filmmaker of his generation: the director Brian De Palma jokingly grumbles that Scorsese had made both the best movie of the eighties (“Raging Bull”) and of the nineties (“GoodFellas”), without even mentioning Scorsese’s touchstones of the previous decade, “Mean Streets” and “Taxi Driver.” But despite Scorsese’s extraordinary artistic achievements, the filmmaker lived with perpetual anxiety—not unfounded—that he wouldn’t be able to continue working, owing to his uneven results at the box office. (Financing for “Gangs of New York” was still up in the air.) The Profile details Scorsese’s distinctive working methods and encyclopedic knowledge of cinema, but it also recalls less familiar aspects of his biography: his five marriages; an aborted collaboration with Liza Minnelli; a missed connection with a relative who had gone into hiding, either from the police or the Mob. But the focus inevitably returns, as it should, to his impact on film. “So many Scorsese ideas have been used so much that they’re no longer Scorsese ideas,” the director Wes Anderson says. “They’re just part of the grammar.” | 
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