SINGAPORE – If we were betting people here at TODAY, we’d say Triple-A-list movie star, former teen heartthrob, “modeliser” and eco-warrior Leonardo DiCaprio will finally win that Best Actor Oscar come Feb 28 (Feb 29, Singapore time).

He’s has been a luckless four-time nominee (Best Actor for Blood Diamond, The Aviator and The Wolf Of Wall Street, Best Supporting Actor for What’s Eating Glibert Grape), but we wouldn’t be surprised if he nabs the Best Actor gong for The Revenant this year.

All the signs are there: He has won all the important pre-Oscar prizes (the Golden Globes, the Screen Actors Guild, the Critics’ Choice and the BAFTA), for one.

Furthermore, his perfectly curated, bear-mauling, bison liver-eating role as 1800s frontiersman and fur trapper Hugh Glass in Alejandro Inarritu’s The Revenant is impeccable Oscar Bait.

With an Academy board who loves it when their actors toil and suffer for their craft, winning that elusive golden statuette seems almost a sure thing for the 41-year-old, Here are the reasons why.

HE BATTLED THE WEATHER ... AND CAME OUT TOPS. “We all worked incredibly hard! The entire crew dealt with extreme circumstances: Whether it was constant extreme weather, or cameras not working because it was 40 degrees below zero, or the snow melting in unprecedented warming period because of climate change in the territory, causing the entire landscape to go dry and barren within five hours. At one point, we shut down for weeks,” said DiCaprio.

“Everyone involved was committed to this movie, committed to making this vision a reality – but we all knew these elements would consume us. I think that, honestly, if I can bring climate change into it ... It was unprecedented, the weather events that occurred. They were very tough conditions, and we knew that. “But that’s why this film was so interesting to make. It was fascinating to do a film where I didn’t have to articulate what was being put up on screen. There are periods where it’s me, alone, at the mercy of the elements. That was challenging – but I have to say, in place of other actors, the places we were, the surroundings gave us a lot to react to.”

HE HAD CONVEY HIS THOUGHTS TO THE AUDIENCE WITHOUT SPEAKING ... AND CAME OUT TOPS. “It was challenging. This film was a completely different way of doing things,” said DiCaprio, who likened making this movie to making a silent movie. “I have very little to say in this movie, but I have to articulate by emoting my struggle. Often times there was nobody else to play off.

“Alejandro and I talked about them at great length. We went through this screenplay and looked at each particular moment and what Glass was going through. The whole process of survival was one that we explored in great detail. Glass says next to nothing throughout the whole film, but I think a lot is conveyed in a performance if the actor embraces or is committed to that.

“At certain times, silent moments in movies convey the inner thoughts of characters and they don’t always need to be articulated, but to me this was a unique challenge because almost nothing is articulated through words.”

HE HAD TO DEAL WITH A LOT OF CHALLENGES ... BUT CAME OUT TOPS. “I don’t think anyone could have predicted the challenges that this movie gave us,” said the actor. “It threw at us every possible challenge you could imagine. But the great thing about making movies is what you’re documenting. You’re documenting struggle and you’re documenting all the things that you went through in making it.

“To me, this is the closest thing I’ve ever done to a documentary even with the CGI elements in the movie – because there are certain things that we could have never done with animal work. If you watch the bear sequence, mark my words, you’ll never see anything like it in cinema history. You feel it’s almost like there’s another sense that’s arisen in you as an audience member. It is so powerful what Alejandro and Chivo (cinematographer Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki) achieved together.”

HE ENDURED BOOT CAMP ... AND CAME OUT TOPS. “I had to learn survival skills, and there was a lot of detail embedded in the script. We worked with specialists to learn about the muskets we used, which take a minute to reload. I had to wear bear fur, which is this carcass of an animal that nearly kills me in the film and that all of a sudden becomes my means of surviving the elements. I learned how to start fires using the elements, how to eat, or how to survive cold temperatures,” said DiCaprio. “We needed to learn all of this, and the journals that fur trappers wrote gave us a sense of the difficult conditions they lived through. Those men were incredibly tough, a different era of men, so to speak. I love nature, do environmental work which exposes me to the wild all the time, but by no means would I ever be able to say I’m a Bear Grylls-type! I couldn’t do what these men did. “

HE TACKLES ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES ... AND COMES OUT TOPS. “Personally, I’d love to find a film about the environment that’s even more literal (than The Revenant),” said the Oscar nominee. “To me, this (movie was) done for the poetry of it. This was done through the idea of what happens when we have gone into untouched territory and try to manipulate that environment. And that’s what is still systematically happening all over the world.

“Oil companies go into Papua New Guinea or the Amazon or Canada and kick the native indigenous people off of their lands or poison their lands and cut down their trees. This is an age old story, and to me this film is set at the beginning of that in the history of America.

“This is the first time that we’ve gone to these territories and started to extract things for capitalistic reasons. There is that theme embedded underneath the film. I don’t think it’s overt. Hopefully, it’s something that people can pick up in the way the story is told.”

The Revenant is out in cinemas now. Catch the encore telecast of the 88th Annual Academy Awards on March 2 at 9pm, March 4 at 10.30pm and March 6 at 4pm on HBO (StarHub TV Ch 601).