Leonardo DiCaprio Broke the Curse

Once upon a time, there was one thing in Hollywood as inevitable as death and taxes (though the super-rich do indeed try their hardest to avoid both): Teen-heartthrob-turned-regular-degular-movie-star Leonardo DiCaprio’s apparent inability to date women over 25. We’ve all seen the chart; we’ve all read the joking headlines. (Jezebel has certainly provided a handful.) And though he’s had a series of fairly long-term relationships, they’ve rarely involved much of a public component. His Oscars date has often been his mom, Irmelin Indenbirken.

But Hollywood, and especially the awards landscape, is changing: Streaming services are regularly nominated—and occasionally win. Sunday night’s Oscars host, Conan O’Brien, focused a lot of his jokes on what studios are demanding to capture waning attention spans. And 51-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio brought his long-time and over-25-year-old girlfriend, Vittoria Ceretti, as his date to the Academy Awards. They were seated right up front, since he was nominated for best actor in One Battle After Another; though he didn’t win, the film took home a lot of major awards, including best picture, best adapted screenplay, and best director for Paul Thomas Anderson.

Ceretti is 27 (and a half) years old, Italian, and a model (so at least Leo’s stuck with his reputation as a modelizer). They’ve been together for over three years, but rarely appear at official events together; the Daily Mail characterized this Oscars outing as their “hard launch.” But in a twist I find deeply funny for some reason, the pair did not walk the red carpet together, so the only photos of them together are seated, during the ceremony. 

DiCaprio doesn’t strike me as someone who is particularly online—and nor should he be, IMO; if I were that rich, you would never find me on Twitter talking shit. (The epidemic of billionaires who are compelled to do this confounds me.) But the no-girlfriends-over-25 observation has dogged him for years; in August 2022, “multiple sources” told People magazine that he and model/actor Camilla Morrone broke up “two months after [her] 25th birthday” after dating for about five years. (Don’t do the math on that one.)

The New York Post claims that Ceretti “won him over” by having her own full schedule and “jet-set life” and, fair enough, it probably helps build a real adult relationship if you both have, uh, jobs. But maybe Leo finally realized that maintaining a quarter-century age gap meant that, very soon, his potential girlfriends wouldn’t even know why he’s famous—they say that Gen Z isn’t watching movies anymore, right?? In any case, if Ceretti had a small part to play in his glow-up last night, I applaud her—although if she was too busy doing cool things (like opening the Olympics!), I applaud her even more.  

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• Congratulations to me for predicting Michael B. Jordan‘s win. [Jezebel]
• An Oscars security guard was weird to Teyana Taylor. [EW]
• Jane Fonda went personal on how bad the impending Hollywood mergers would be (“I slept with the guy that created” CNN, Ted Turner) and political (“bad for workers”). [Variety]
• Law Roach said he got “a lot of calls” after revealing that Zendaya and Tom Holland have already gotten hitched. [Daily Mail]
• Brooklyn Beckham wished his mother-in-law a happy birthday on British Mother’s Day. [TMZ]
• Alix Earle and Tom Brady have “never been serious.” [Us Weekly]

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