How Bradley Cooper Became This Year's Oscar Villain

[Music] I don't think I need to explain to you who Bradley Cooper is he's one of the most famous actors working in Hollywood today and let's be honest he's pretty good at it I haven't ever seen a Bradley Cooper performance that I've actively disliked although he has been in movies that I've disliked but we'll get there and I bet that if you ask the average person how many Oscars Bradley Cooper has either for acting or for directing they'd probably say at least one the way that most people think that Samuel Jackson has an Oscar or Jake Gyllenhaal or William Defoe dear God somebody please give William defo a goddamn Oscar anyway if you haven't been keeping up with the Oscar race over the last few years you might be surprised to learn that Bradley Cooper has never won one and nobody is more sad about that fact than Bradley Cooper I was surprised I got to admit that you were not nominated for best director oh thank you were you surprised by that disappointed by that or did you just take it in stride uh I was not surprised I'm never surprised about not getting anything uh but but I did feel you know and it's funny you ask that because I have thought about this because I was with my friend I was in New York City at a coffee shop and I looked down at my phone uh and Nicole had texted me and they said you know congratulations on these other things but they didn't they didn't tell me the bad news yes you know and I went oh wow and and the first thing I felt was embarrassment actually Sophie's choice for 2024 you win the Oscar not only for best director but best actor and Carrie Mulligan wins best actress or the Eagles have a Super Bowl victory do you CH B Victory wow Eagles I know you're lying now aren't you and I guess I'm joking around a little bit here he's clearly not that outwardly bitter about it and you also might be saying well he should be upset that he hasn't won an Academy Award he's overcome a lot in his personal life he's well respected by many of his peers and he is a pretty impressive body of work he has every right to feel whatever way he feels about it and yes he does but when it com comes to award season narratives are everything and this year his Oscar campaign for his newest movie Maestro which he wrote and directed is not exactly doing him any favors in the public court of opinion and we'll get there but first let's take a quick trip down memory lane I thought oh Richie demasu is going to stay in the office I'm outside on the field I got people working for me my ideas I'm running the show I'm the quarter back and I'm not going to settle what happened to Tommy he died how' he die please don't bring it up hey Tiffany this is Pat you look nice thank you how Tommy die oh Bradley Cooper got his first two acting nominations for two films directed by David O Russell a director who I despised long before all of the horrible [ __ ] came out about him I mean I haven't seen Silver Lightning's playbook in a long time but I do remember liking it well enough but God damn I hated American Hustle that movie is absolute dog [ __ ] [ __ ] David or Russell for so many reasons but also he personally owes me like $15 for all of the money that I wasted going to see that [ __ ] in theaters it was terrible but you know those were Cooper's first two times in Oscar contention and the narrative back then was that he had plenty of time to win one and plenty of opportunities to work in more Prestige projects with different directors and that was definitely the case with his role in the 2015 film American Sniper I got a military age male on a cell phone watching the Convoy over if you think he's reporting troop movement you have a green light here a call over maybe he's just calling his old lady he stepped off American Sniper was one of those weird movies that made the entire Oscar race unusually political that year I remember around that time there was a big movement of dumb asses online who insisted that not rooting for this film to win was inherently unamerican just because it's based on the story of an American Navy SEAL named Chris Kyle and it was directed by Clint Eastwood and in their eyes that meant we all had to constantly suck it off as a great achievement of American Cinema because patriotism I guess even though the film has been widely criticized for its historical inaccuracies its mischaracterization about the war in Iraq and the weird looking prop baby American Sniper was one of those late in the game Oscar pushes because it made a [ __ ] ton of money and it was seen as more of a consumer friendly Underdog back when that kind of narrative still mattered for the Oscar and let's be honest I don't think there was any way Cooper was going to win anything for this just because of how polarizing it was at the time and he came away mostly unscathed for it because it's pretty well understood that his portrayal of Chris Kyle divorced from like the abhorent alternate reality that the movie takes place in is pretty solid but okay back to the drawing board one more time let's [Music] go baby it's time to live the old way so this is the first movie that Bradley Cooper has been nominated for that I have actually really enjoyed it's also up until this point the most Oscar batty movie that he is not only starred in but also directed A stars born has had two previous iterations before it was remade in 2018 with Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga with Bradley Cooper of course starring in the film and sitting in the director's chair as well Cooper was nominated for an Oscar for his portrayal of the character Jackson M but was notably snubbed for best director which shocked a lot of people following the race around that time a lot of people speculated that this was because members of The Academy don't really like when actors direct the films that they're in looking back through the history of the Oscars it has been possible for actors who directed to get nominated for both this has happened to Clint Eastwood multiple times for example but to my knowledge an actor has never won for both and double nominations for both categories are generally speaking pretty rare do I think he should have won for best director in 2019 no I guess not but I guess I could have also argued for a nomination to be given given that this wasn't a particularly crowded field in that particular year and I absolutely think that if we're talking like pound-for-pound best actor he definitely could have won aami Malik that year because literally anyone could have won aami Malik godamn I can't go into like the level of contempt I have had for Bohemian rap city since that movie came out but uh that's another rant for another day anyway that brings us to this year's Oscar race where Bradley Cooper is once again making his return as both an actor and director for the biopic Maestro a film chronicling The Life Of Fame conductor Leonard Bernstein although to be fair if you ask the cast and pretty much anyone involved with like the editorial of the film they don't classify it as a biopic uh Carrie Mulligan for example has routinely said that it is a love story but like I don't know it is a film depicting the life of a famous person uh who did at one time walk this Earth so I'm going to say it's a biopic a lot of people online have been categorizing Maestro as like Primo Oscar bait and I do want to acknowledge the fact fact that the term Oscar bait is pretty subjective hi uh postproduction Kayla cutting in here to briefly say that I'm about to talk about what Oscar bait is in the next section of this video and what I refuse to do is insert clips of films that I personally think are Oscar bait because the last thing I need is 10 million comments being like what do you mean that movie is Oscar bait that movie is not Oscar bait it's a brilliant whatever I'm over it so what we're going to do instead is I'm going to insert b-roll of we fishing get it fishing bait anyway let's continue if you were unfamiliar with that saying it usually is a term ascribed to a movie that seems to have been made with the expressed purpose of doing well at the Academy Awards there have been plenty of films that fall into the modern-day Oscar bait genre but a lot of the times they're either biopics or they're self-serious period dramas usually they feature a lot of like heavy set elements a lot of bigname actors but Oscar bait is kind of a moving Target based on the overall public perception of a movie for example I totally think that if the barbin Heimer phenomenon hadn't happen Oppenheimer probably would have been considered Oscar bait and I'm saying that as someone who is a big fan of Christopher Nolan and I'm happy Oppenheimer made the amount of money they did I'm glad the whole barin Heimer discourse got a lot of people out to go see both movies I'm very happy all of that happened I just think that had that not happened people would have been quicker to [ __ ] on Oppenheimer for like trying to win Christopher Nolan the Best Director award so okay and now that we've established what Oscar bait is let's talk about Maestro its perception and how it came to be and why some people think that it is fitting into this category and backfiring on Bradley Cooper a little bit okay so it's important to note that this project has been in development since around 2017 initially Martin Scorsese was going to direct it but he stepped down from the project to go complete the Irishman then apparently Steven Spielberg was going to direct it but ended up handing the Reigns to Cooper after seeing a star is born and both Spielberg and scors ended up staying on as producers of the film as far as what Drew Bradley Cooper so strongly to this project I'll let him tell it and he talked to me about potentially acting in it just acting knew how much I loved conducting since I was a kid obsessed with it how did you get into conducting as a kid I mean when I say conducting play conducting like you know no I know but why what was it Tom Jerry you know Bugs Bunny you know the so it was like cartoon conducting you thought that was well I that's where I start I was like oh well you can do this and like the sound comes out you know and then I asked s CLA for Baton and I was like just around 8 years old and then um and then I would just conduct all the time because there was classical music playing in my house we had a record player in the living room and I used always just sit in the living room and just start to conduct whatever the music was and then I started to have favorite pieces of music and it would ask my dad to get CDs of that and so I would spend hours and hours and then in grad school Ellen buron came and did a workshop with us and we like create a character and I wrote a monologue about a conductor so I was like this conductor God really in huge part of me and I knew that somewhere I thought gosh I've done so much work on like believing I'm a conductor that if I ever had the chance to play one there's years and years of like rehearsal inside of me and lo and behold Bradley Cooper did then get the chance to play a famous conductor by the name of Leonard Bernstein it almost seems too good to be true so much so that people have been speculating that this is Cap I go back and forth on it just because I feel like parts of that story story that he's telling to Emma Stone are almost too specific for him to be capping but you know outside of this one anecdote that could be interpreted as a genuine experience that he had he's been doing a lot of the typical Oscar campaign interview route stuff where he's explained his process of like really getting into the character he at one point explains to Emma Stone in that actor on actor interview that he was so in character that he was like literally playing Leonard Bernstein while he was directing like he was in character like until they rat for the day he also has been telling this story that's been making the rounds on the internet about how he took 6 years to basically learn how to actually conduct because in the movie there's this big sort of one take scene where Bradley Cooper as Leonard Bernstein conducts a full Orchestra for 6 minutes straight and from what I understand there's no cutaways it's pretty much all just one take and so the whole thing was that he wanted to be able to do that with a live Orchestra which meant that he literally needed to learn how to conduct which is a pretty complex skill although him telling this story over and over in a lot of the different press junkins and stuff like that has been inter reted by some people as almost like very try hard Behavior like oh God he's really campaigning for this Oscar he spent 6 years learning how to do a new skill just for this one role and people have also sort of you know been juxtaposing what Bradley Cooper has been saying about his method in order to get into character for this role with what Killian Murphy did to get into character for Oppenheimer and for those who don't know Killian Murphy he just has like a much more laid-back approach to not only acting but also like life in general he's kind of just naturally A Logan key guy and whether or not that whole Persona is intentional people just really take kindly to his demeanor and kind of always have and they're really rooting for him to get this Oscar and that makes sense because Killian's a fantastic actor and a lot of people view it as like a long overdue thing but because so many people are rooting for Killian in this Oscar race I feel like it's almost produced this sort of manufactured rivalry where Bradley Cooper in The Narrative has become like the establishment villain for example it's pretty well known that kilan Murphy had about 6 months to prepare for the role of Oppenheimer as opposed to Bradley Cooper who practiced the art of conducting for 6 years in preparation for this role just two very different styles of like approaching a character and then Bradley Cooper made this comment in the actors on actors video with Emma Stone that I'll play for you in a second that people I think kind of took out of context and misinterpreted as him Throwing Shade at Killian Murphy uh I don't think it was deliberate if I'm going to be honest with you but like that's kind of what kicked off this whole like rivalry online I think this wasn't like you got a call and then month you're going to do it you know like this had to have taken years I think another narrative that's working against Bradley Cooper right now a little bit uh is ironclaw uh if you haven't seen ironclaw it's absolutely fantastic one of my favorite movies of the year but uh Zack Efron in particular is getting a lot of praise for his portrayal of Kevin von Eric it's sort of become like a late stage Underdog pick for the Oscar race this year and people online are suggesting that like he should get in for a best actor nomination over Bradley Cooper as if Bradley Cooper himself is the direct reason why Zack Efron is not going to get a nomination for ironclaw which if you are not familiar this is not how this kind of thing works if Zack Efron doesn't get a nomination it's because a24 kind of [ __ ] up the distribution of ironclaw to the point that like the movie came out too late and a lot of Academy members had already voted before seeing his performance also unfortunately Maestro just had the you know the luck of coming out in a really stacked year for movies this is one of the best years for movies like that I have seen in a very long time had this come out in any other year I feel like the whole project would have been perceived a little bit more favorably also we're all just completely ignoring the fact that like Paul Giamatti could just come out of nowhere with like the underdog swoop for the holdovers and honestly I hope he does that was my favorite movie of the year but the last thing I want to mention about Maestro is the sort of tangible controversy that has come from this film so far basically Bradley Cooper was in heavy makeup for a lot of different stages in this movie to portray you know the stages of Leonard burn 's life and when images from the movie first released a lot of people noticed that Bradley Cooper was wearing a prosthetic nose which was interpreted by some to be anti-semitic as Leonard Bernstein is Jewish and also people felt that it was just like an unnecessary addition to like the transformational aspect of the character however it is worth noting that the children of Leonard Bernstein who work closely with Bradley Cooper on this film uh rushed to defend him after this controversy saying that the use of the prosthetic nose and the makeup was just a method for Bradley Cooper to get into character to more accurately portray their father but I don't know to me personally it looks a little unnecessary if you look at the pictures of both of them side by side I think this kind of added to the overall narrative that Bradley Cooper's whole involvement in this movie is just a vanity project in which he can lose himself in the iconography of a character just to pull out the Oscar win and I do feel a little bad after putting all this together because from all the research that I've done Bradley Cooper just seems like a guy who is genuinely very passionate about his craft and about acting and about making movies and I feel like a lot of the anec not that he shared about the making of maestro on this press Jun in and during his Oscar campaign uh were things that he was legitimately excited to share and talk about but because of like the year that Maestro came out in and all the other movies that it's up against all of the other actors that he's up against the fact that this kind of biopic is definitely being perceived in this day and age as like the most traditional form of Oscar bait it's all really just working against him that's all for me today you guys uh let me know who you would like to see win best picture at the Oscars this year it is a stacked year I personally think Oppenheimer is going to win but like again the underdog you know in me is kind of rooting for the holdovers just because I love that movie so much but uh let me know what your favorite performances are let's just talk about the movies in the comments you know let's let's talk about our favorite performances of the year because there were a lot of good ones thanks so much you guys and I'll see you next time [Music]

Channel: kayla says

Views: 276,560

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Length: 16min 38sec (998 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 05 2024