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.
But Cooper, who is in contention for both starring in and directing the Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro, has made ruffledness a central plank of his campaign. He’s been pounding the trail relentlessly, making it clear that to him, these honors really do matter. Will this classic gambit still wash with 2020s voters? Watch this space.
It certainly isn’t playing well on the internet, where Cooper’s every publicity stop has so far been met with much collective sneering. First, social media was up in arms over his use of a prosthetic nose to play the (Jewish) Bernstein, despite the fact the make-up design was a) seamlessly naturalistic and b) personally signed off by the conductor and composer’s children. Then it heaped scorn on his story about spending six years learning how to conduct, in order to convince during a six-minute scene in which Bernstein leads the London Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Mahler’s Symphony No 2.
Later came a much-smirked-about video conversation with Michael Mann, in which he sobbingly thanked the director for not casting him in his 2009 gangster picture Public Enemies (Mann had written him a keep-trying-kid note after the audition which stood on his mantelpiece for years), and also a poorly received news story about him banning Maestro’s cast and crew from sitting down on set, in order to keep their collective energy up. (“There’s no chairs on sets,” he said. “I’ve always hated chairs and I feel like your energy dips the minute you sit down in a chair.” “Ableist!” Twitter shrieked.)
He’s been pounding the trail relentlessly, making it clear that to him, these honors really do matter.
What is going on here? Barely five years ago, when Cooper’s adaptation of A Star is Born left the Oscars empty-handed save a single award for Best Original Song, Cooper was widely viewed as one of Hollywood’s great under-appreciated rising talents. He’d just directed, starred in and co-written an enormously successful musical melodrama, turned Lady Gaga into Leading Lady Gaga, yet somehow ended up losing repeatedly to Bohemian Rhapsody and Green Book.
Admittedly in this year’s race, his competition is much tougher. In the Best Picture category alone, Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, Poor Things and Barbie are innovative, daring, popular one-offs that all feel on the face of things like more exciting choices than a baton-swishing Netflix biopic. But Maestro is also far from stodgy prestige fare: while there is clearly a preening, conventionally awards-hungry version of that story, Cooper hasn’t made it. Regardless of prosthetic enhancements, it’s the work of an auteur-star with his defenses down, from its madly earnest On the Town-themed dream ballet to its entirely extraordinary Mahler sequence, which can only be scoffed at by those who haven’t seen it.
“There’s no chairs on sets,” he said. “I’ve always hated chairs.”
What has actually done for Cooper is the fact that every contest needs a villain, and his main rivals simply aren’t up to the task. The 56-year-old Giamatti is in the running for a loveable-curmudgeon role that fully capitalizes on all the qualities audiences love him for. He also has only a single Oscar nomination on his CV to date – for playing Russell Crowe’s boxing manager in Cinderella Man, rather than one of his acclaimed lead turns in Sideways and Private Life – so, perhaps even more so than Cooper, is unquestionably “due”.
Then there is the 47-year-old Murphy, who as a veteran supporting player is far less likely to convincingly compete as a lead in future, which creates an urgency around his Oppenheimer chances. (Cooper, already a three-time Best Actor nominee, can’t work that angle.) And in basic internet-boyfriend terms – gifted, self-effacing, handsome but not in a matinee-idol way – Murphy is also the dream pick.
Meanwhile, fairly or otherwise, both Cooper’s recent career and Hollywood-leading-man looks give him the air of an in-house candidate.
So the season has its first soapy subplot. But how swayed will voters actually be? It’s hard to believe that desperation is no longer an asset in Hollywood, and given the extreme likelihood of Cooper continuing to be nominated for his performance in Maestro (the directing, writing and overall film fields will be much more closely fought), we’ll probably have no idea until the fateful envelopes are actually unstuck. In the meantime, however, Maestro’s campaign team must be looking at this very modern show-business plot arc, and wondering what on earth happened to the good old glory-magnetizing sweet spot between top dog and underdog.
Robbie Collin is the U.K.-based chief film critic at The Telegraph
