Bradley Cooper spent years perfecting his performance of legendary conductor Leonard Bernstein – but even that and a lengthy campaign wasn’t enough to get him the Oscar. Instead, his performance was to be overshadowed by his seemingly intense desperation to win, and the Oscar for Best Actor instead went to quiet, nonchalant frontrunner Cillian Murphy.
“And the Oscar goes to… Cillian Murphy!”
Cooper’s Oscar’s journey actually highlights an interesting conundrum for Hollywood actors: it is very much a part of their job to go out on the awards trail and try to convince everyone that their film – and they specifically – deserve to be rewarded. But, if they get a little too overzealous, it can lead to some pretty intense backlash. There’s also the flipside that if they don’t promote themselves enough they can essentially get forgotten, passed over again and again even though everyone knows they’re incredibly talented.
So why is Bradley so apparently desperate for an Oscar – and why has that made people kind of turn on him? And why did people find Cillian’s more detached attitude much more endearing this go around? Let’s dive into all of those questions, plus take a deeper look at the overall mystery of what it really takes to run an Oscars campaign and why it’s kind of started turning people off of the Oscars all together.
Bradley Cooper’s Quest For Accolades
Bradley Cooper is a highly nominated actor – but so far, he hasn’t experienced much of a winning streak. Though Bradley and his mom were willing to joke about it in a 2023 Superbowl commercial, it seems like, with his work on the Leonard Bernstein biopic Maestro, Cooper was doing everything in his power to get a win. As the New York Post’s reviewer Johnny Oleksinski said, Maestro hits ‘the typical Oscars rubric’ – but not necessarily in a good way. Elsewhere, Scott Campbell at Far Out magazine said that Maestro seemed ‘precision engineered’ to win in an article that called out Cooper for his ‘relentless obsession’ with winning an Oscar.
Maybe it makes sense that he’s obsessed, though – on Jason Bateman and Will Arnett’s podcast SmartLess, he mentioned that he was once mocked for his high number of nominations with no wins by a famous director.
“I’m standing next to a woman who’s a dear friend who’s an actress and he goes, ‘What world are we living in where you have seven nominations what she’s only got three?’”
And now that Maestro was nominated so many times, Cooper’s number of Oscar nominations is up to twelve. He had the chance to join an elite Hollywood club, as only two actors in history – that’s Laurence Olivier and Roberto Benigni – have directed themselves to an acting win. But he wasn’t the favorite to win any of his categories, and in the end got pushed even further into a less fun club to be a part of – people with a big number of nominations and no wins.
A rollercoaster story; a dazzling leading lady opposite him; and six years’ worth of conducting lessons distilled into six intense minutes at the end of the movie [1:56:33 What did I do? Oh that’s what I do - applause] might make this performance feel like a shoo-in for the movie industry’s most coveted award. The movie was up for seven Oscars – including three for Cooper himself, for Best Actor, Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. But for plenty of people, the film’s Oscar-worthiness was exactly what’s wrong with Cooper’s 2024 bid. So why can’t we just let him have it – and be happy for him? Well, in part, because the Oscars aren’t just about great performances – there are industry politics at play. But it’s also because Cooper seemed a little embittered. In what many saw as a dig at Best Actor frontrunner and eventual winner Cillian Murphy, he said [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o14-SeLGl2c 18:39 This wasn’t like you got a call and then six months later you’re doing the thing, this had to have taken years].
Cillian, for his part, has always been pretty removed from the Hollywood machine as an actor, more interested in the work than the spotlight. And this held true for his Oscar campaign as well – he did the requisite promo, but also seemed uncomfortable with having the focus be so much on him. He falls more into the ‘quiet, brooding artist’ archetype that Hollywood loves – for men, at least. Oppenheimer being a surprise mega-hit summer blockbuster obviously helped propel Cillian’s great performance to the front of the awards pack, but his more reserved nature also to many felt more genuine than Bradley’s more over the top antics. And in the end, he was the one who capped off the night with a win.
Why is Bradley so obsessed?
Why do actors want an Oscar so much, anyway? As Leonardo DiCaprio once famously said, ‘I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t.’ DiCaprio is another often-nominated actor whose failure to win an Oscar became something of an industry scandal, up until he finally got the award for The Revenant. Ultimately, the desire for validation from our peers is a very human thing – we are programmed to want it from childhood, and it continues in later life in the workplace. It’s just that actors’ validation from their peers plays out on a red carpet.
In an article called ‘Why do the Oscars matter?’ in the Washington Post, Sonia Rao quoted an awards strategist who said “The talent wants the awards because of their egos and because it helps their careers, and the studios want to help the talent because it helps the studios. It’s all symbiotic. It all feeds into itself.” And there are two key aspects of ‘wanting’ there – ego, and career. As viewers, it sometimes feels like we can ascertain which category Oscar nominees slot into.
Take, for example, Anne Hathaway, who was treated with extraordinary levels of vitriol when she won the Best Actress Oscar for her role as Fantine in Les Misérables in 2013. As one writer put it, she reminded us that women aren’t allowed to want things. For years, Hathaway came up against hate online, and it seemed to be because she just wanted acknowledgement for her craft. Yet DiCaprio didn’t get any of that hate; when writers penned articles such as ‘Why Leonardo DiCaprio must never win an Oscar’, they were tongue-in-cheek accolades about the quality of his acting setting a high bar in Hollywood as he strove for one. So there definitely seems to be a gender issue at the heart of who usually gets hate for wanting an Oscar. It’s like we want women to pretend they don’t want to be awarded – and yet, if they don’t buy into the pageantry, it’s unlikely they’ll receive anything.
One example is Amy Adams – she has more nominations than Leo did when he was finally awarded, but no matter how deserving she is of an award, because she’s quiet about her Oscar nods, it’s like she gets passed over. Just like Amy, Carey Mulligan – Cooper’s co-star in Maestro – is an often-nominated, rarely awarded actress. Many even say that Cooper’s biggest mistake when it came to using Maestro as his latest Oscar bid was casting Mulligan because she so greatly outshone him – but ironically, her exceptional performance was somehow seen by some as a reason she wouldn’t win – Francesca Steel writes for the Independent that ‘Sometimes stars who look like a dead cert to win Oscars at some point in their career are precisely the ones who never get one, maybe because Academy voters get used to seeing them churn out spectacular stuff, or maybe because it feels like such actors are bound to get one sooner or later.’ It’s like these actors (literally) cannot win.
How did Cooper’s desperation bring him here - and why is he getting hate for it?
The trouble with the Oscars is that they aren’t based solely on merit — there are powerful people pulling strings. Even so, there are some things actors are perceived to be able to do in order to increase the likelihood they’ll be nominated or go on to win. Vogue published a jokey list of 11 things an actor can do to boost their chances, and with Maestro, Cooper ticked quite a few of the magazine’s boxes - playing a real person, being American and being a triple threat of director, writer and actor. Playing Leonard Bernstein required a lot from Cooper – he learned to conduct, he studied Bernstein’s mannerisms intensely, altering his physical appearance and aiming to inhabit the character. He undertook similar preparation for A Star Is Born. He learned to sing and to play the guitar, and trained himself to lower his voice. Vox notes that this kind of difficult, immersive acting is something Academy members favor when casting their votes.
But the only true thing that actors can do to get on the path to winning an Oscar is get nominated in the first place – and that takes a campaign. Cooper campaigned – hard – for months. He talked about Maestro so much that the audience was saturated and almost sick of hearing about it – as Alex Abad Santos asked in Vox, ‘where were you when you realised you knew too much about Bradley Cooper?’ He even did interviews with Leonard Bernstein’s family.
“I was eating with my hands and I… apologized… and she said, ‘That’s what my dad used to do!’ Yep corn on the cob, and I remember in that moment I thought, oh this might happen.”
Over the past few years, the campaigning that actors have to undertake to get nominated has become more visible. It’s not just an organic process that hinges on a brilliant performance – it usually takes a lot of cash to be considered for an Oscar. There was serious drama last year when Andrea Riseborough received a surprise nomination after a series of high profile actors suddenly began to sing her praises on social media. Awards strategists questioned the legitimacy of Riseborough’s campaign, and her nomination was almost rescinded – and this all happened on a very public stage.
As the behind-the-scenes machinations continue to become more talked about than the actual films and performances themselves, the Oscars seems to be continuing its slide away from a glamorous, serious night of awarding talent and towards just being tabloid fodder for people to argue about on social media and then forget about immediately. And there being so many snubs of audience favorites – and often a major lack of films from outside of Hollywood – in favor of people who are better at “playing the game” has also started to turn people off of the awards show. While Bradley’s whole thing might have been the most talked about, the real snub of the night was Killer of the Flower Moon’s Lily Gladstone, who many thought was a shoe-in to make a historic win, but instead lost to Emma Stone who nabbed her second Best Actress win for Poor Things (which, to be fair, was also a great performance!)
Conclusion
Cooper had done everything in his power to make himself a worthy candidate for an Oscar – any Oscar. The trouble is, as Alissa Wilkinson writes for Vox, contenders for Hollywood’s greatest accolade are supposed to pretend they don’t care. So in even taking on the Maestro project – something that felt like a sure thing – Bradley Cooper has made an error – and one that no amount of backtracking can fix. So this might not have been Bradley’s year, but since he is such a great actor, maybe he will nab the next one by… acting like he doesn’t care.