What’s been your favorite piece of acting so far this awards season? I don’t mean in the films, but at the ceremonies themselves, where nominees have already been airing their best fixed grins as one of their rivals airily retrieves the prize they’ve spent the last six months envisioning on their own sideboards. My number one so far? Bradley Cooper at the Golden Globes, who watched Cillian Murphy collecting the Best Performance in a Motion Picture – Drama trophy with the sort of smile that could bite through a kayak.
What made Cooper’s performance that night so moving is that he is perhaps the only one of 2024’s better-known contenders to not even attempt 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 in The Holdovers – have both spent the last month or so projecting auras of genial, unruffled calm on the circuit.
