Bradley Cooper is keeping a close eye on the Oscars. Photo: Mario Anzuoni/File photo
What was your favorite acting performance this awards season? I'm not talking about the movies, but the ceremonies themselves, where the nominees have already put on their best fixed smiles as one of their competitors easily takes home the prize they've been coveting for the past six months on their buffets. My number one at the moment? Bradley Cooper at the Golden Globes, who watched Cillian Murphy collect the Best Actor in a Motion Picture trophy – a drama trophy with a smile that could bite through a kayak.
What made Cooper's performance that night so exciting was that he is perhaps the only one of the more prominent 2024 contenders who doesn't even try to hide the fact that he really, truly, and desperately wants to win. His main rivals in the best actor race – Oppenheimer star Murphy and Paul Giamatti, whose new film The Leftovers opens this week – have both spent the last month or so projecting an aura of genial, deadpan calm on the track.
But Cooper, who is in contention to both star and direct the Leonard Bernstein biopic “Maestro,” has made grievances a central plank of his campaign. He pursued this path tirelessly, making it clear that these honors really mattered to him. Will this classic gambit still appeal to voters in the 2020s? Follow this section.
This is definitely not going down well on the internet, where every promotion Cooper has made so far has been met with widespread ridicule. First, social media was up in arms over his use of a prosthetic nose as (the Jewish) Bernstein, despite the fact that the makeup was a) impeccably naturalistic and b) personally signed by the conductor and the composer's children. He then ridiculed his account of how he spent six years learning to conduct to convince during a six-minute scene in which Bernstein leads the London Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Mahler's Symphony No. 2.
here you can actually see a montage of flashbacks to 6 years of training to swing a stick going to waste as he looks at Cillian Murphy pic.twitter.com/pbWYCWxLxD
— اقراﺀ (@ghoulhag) January 8, 2024
Later, there was a grin-inducing video conversation with Michael Mann, in which he sobbingly thanked the director for not casting him in the 2009 gangster film Public Enemies (Mann wrote him a childish note to “keep trying” after the audition, which took place on his mantelpiece for years), as well as the poorly received news that he banned the Maestro cast and crew from sitting on set to maintain their collective energy. (“There are no chairs on set,” he said. “I’ve always hated chairs and I feel like your energy drops as soon as you sit in a chair.” “Ableist!” screamed Twitter.)
What's going on here? Just five years ago, when Cooper's adaptation of A Star Is Born left the Oscars empty-handed except for a single award for Best Original Song, Cooper was widely considered one of Hollywood's greatest underrated rising talents. He had just directed, starred in and co-written a hugely successful musical melodrama, turned Lady Gaga into a leading Lady Gaga, but somehow ended up losing repeatedly to Bohemian Rhapsody and Green Book.
Admittedly, his competition is much tougher in this year's race. In the Best Picture category alone, “Oppenheimer,” “Killers of the Flower Moon,” “Bad Boys” and “Barbie” are innovative, bold and popular films that, on the surface, seem like more exciting choices than the baton-swinging Netflix biopic. But “Maestro” is also far from boring prestige fare: while there is a decidedly boastful, traditionally awards-hungry version of the story, Cooper doesn't deliver on it. Regardless of the prosthetic enhancements, this is the work of an auteur film star whose defenses have been let down, from a maddeningly serious dream ballet based on On the Town to a completely offbeat Mahler sequence that can only be laughed at by those who haven't seen it. .
Star Creator: Cooper as Leonard Bernstein in Maestro Photo: Jason MacDonald
What really did it for Cooper was the fact that every competition needs a villain, and his main rivals just aren't up to the task. Giamatti, 56, takes on the role of a lovable curmudgeon who takes full advantage of all the qualities for which audiences love him. To date, his biography also includes only one Oscar nomination – for the role of boxing manager Russell Crowe in the film Cinderella Man, and not for one of his famous leading roles in the films Sideways and Private Lives – so which is perhaps even more so than Cooper, no doubt.” due.”
Then there's the 47-year-old Murphy, who, as an experienced supporting player, is much less likely to compete convincingly as a frontrunner in the future, creating urgency around his chances at Oppenheimer. (Cooper, already nominated three times for best actor, can't work from that angle.) And from an Internet guy's perspective—gifted, modest, handsome, but not in the matinee idol way—Murphy is also a dream choice.
Fairly or not, both Cooper's recent career and the appearance of a Hollywood leader give him the appearance of a tenured candidate.
So, the season has its first soap story. But how swinging will voters really be? It's hard to believe that desperation is no longer an advantage in Hollywood, and given the high likelihood that Cooper will continue to be nominated for his role in Maestro (directing, writing and filmmaking in general will be much more fiercely contested), we probably have no idea I have until the fatal envelopes are really peeled off. In the meantime, however, the Maestro's campaign team must be looking at this very modern showbiz storyline and wondering what happened to the good old fame-magnet, middle ground between leader and underdog.
“Maestro” is now on Netflix
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