No one wants an Oscar as badly as Bradley Cooper

Where were you when you realized that you knew too much about Bradley Cooper? Was it when he revealed he spent six years studying conducting to perform as Leonard Bernstein in his auteurist Netflix original film Maestro? Or perhaps it was the time he cried in front of Bernstein’s surviving family. Maybe it was when he said his dad walked around naked his whole childhood? Or when you learned that he reportedly “hates” chairs, and banned them on his set because they suck the energy out of the people who sit in them?
The reason many of us know a lot about Cooper at this moment is that he’s in the home stretch of an Oscar campaign for Maestro, which he directed, co-wrote, and starred in. The film is up for seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Cooper. And an Oscar campaign means a lot of talking about the movie in the hope that what you say will sway voters to give said film awards. Cooper currently has zero Oscars, despite 12 total nominations, and the interviews he’s been giving indicate that he would very much like to change that goose egg.
What’s perhaps strange to some is that Bradley Cooper is a man who became famous for being cool and hot, and for starring in movies — Wet Hot American Summer, Wedding Crashers, The Hangover, Guardians of the Galaxy — that aren’t Oscar stuff.
When did the guy who voices a machine gun-toting space raccoon start caring about the interior life of Leonard Bernstein? When exactly did the bro in Wedding Crashers become a method actor? Why is a guy who is so good at being likable in some movies so unbelievably bad at being likable in real life?
The thing is: It’s the other way around. This extremely serious, try-hard man who hates chairs and loves Leonard Bernstein is who Bradley Cooper has always been — whether we like him or not.
Cooper has been in the conversation for acting Oscars since 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook. Cooper wasn’t going to beat Daniel Day-Lewis’s turn as Abraham Lincoln at that year’s ceremony, but he was largely seen as a talented underdog who showed more versatility than his previous roles. Looking back, Cooper probably should have received more awards for his 2018 directorial debut, A Star is Born. He could have taken home the Best Actor award that year — Rami Malek’s win for Bohemian Rhapsody seems more clownish by the day — and even if the film was not Best Picture, it’s clear no film should have lost to Green Book.
But it was during that latter Oscar run that something shifted.
In September 2018, during the Oscar campaign for A Star is Born, the New York Times published a story on Cooper entitled “Bradley Cooper Is Not Really Into This Profile.” Journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner detailed at length how reluctant Cooper was to give her personal details about the extremely powerful film he created, to the point where Cooper seemed disenchanted, even annoyed at her. He basically told her that she and anyone else who isn’t an artist like Cooper would never fully understand the way he creates art.
The Hollywood Reporter’s Scott Feinberg explained at the time that the New York Times profile soured Cooper’s image, that he was no longer seen as the talented, lovable hunk but an actor-director who had suddenly become insufferably self-serious.
But the thing is, and what Brodesser-Akner highlights so well in that profile, is that Cooper was never a stud who accidentally became a serious actor. It’s the other way around. Cooper has always been a serious theater kid, one who got his MFA at the Actors Studio, who just happened to get famous for playing hot idiot bros.
There is no better evidence of who Bradley Cooper is than footage from his time as a student at the Actors Studio, where successful thespians often dropped by — on camera! — to share their wisdom. Cooper has said that he learned firsthand from Ellen Burstyn, and he famously asked Robert De Niro an extremely nerdy question about his mannerisms and the nuance behind his gestures. There’s also a clip of Cooper geeking out and asking Sean Penn about Hurlyburly and what it was like to revisit a theater role for a movie adaptation.
When Cooper returned to the Actors Studio in 2011, this time as a pro, he spoke about The Hangover at length. In that film, Cooper’s character is attacked by a tiger during a Vegas bachelor party, so presumably the actor tried to bring nuance to getting lacerated by a big cat, saying that he was invigorated to “play the truth” of that moment and the movie’s other hijinks.
I am not an expert actor nor a victim of a big cat attack, but I can confidently say that Bradley Cooper is extremely serious about acting. Directing, starring in, and writing movies like A Star is Born and Maestro are actually what he’s always wanted, even though he’s so good at playing dudes who are the exact opposite. And what’s made it so strange is that people, including some of his biggest critics, prefer the latter.
In retrospect, Cooper snobbily withholding personal details during A Star is Born couldn’t be more different from Cooper bombarding us with TMI about Maestro. Going from telling Brodesser-Akner nothing to telling anyone everything is a stark contrast. But as dissimilar as Cooper’s behavior has been across the two campaigns, they both indicate that this man seriously wants an Oscar.
Cooper’s desire just seems much more blazingly obvious with Maestro, a movie that checks so many Oscar-bait boxes — prosthetics, a famous male subject, mid-Atlantic accents, closeted gayness, Hollywood and Broadway as settings, and a lot of people calling each other “darling,” sometimes in very hostile ways — but has not been the favorite this season.
Campaigning for Maestro has given us the clearest glimpse into Bradley Cooper’s most serious form. Since its release in September, the movie has been accompanied — if not eclipsed — by Cooper talking about how hard the film was to make, how committed he was in making the biopic, and how the experience changed him on an empirical level.
For starters: his vendetta against chairs. Talking to fellow director Spike Lee for Variety, Cooper said that chairs are like vampires. Seats, you see, suck the power from people on them. It might seem like a rest for achy knees or a respite for your barking dogs, but to Cooper that’s all a trap. “I’ve always hated chairs on sets; your energy dips the minute you sit down in a chair,” he told Lee.
In addition to running his movies with the same spirit as a Zara floor manager, Cooper also told Lee that he was so deep into the role of Leonard Bernstein that he would give out orders in Leonard Bernstein’s voice. “Yes, I was playing Lenny throughout his life,” he said. “It was hilarious, because on days when I was young Lenny, the energy of the set was faster and we got more done. And then when I was old Lenny, it had a slower gear. If you ask the crew or cast, Lenny directed the movie.”
Yet, despite six years studying how conductors’ arms move (up, down, side to side), not sitting, and developing an emotional attachment to Bernstein so powerful that his spirit moves the director to cry, Cooper has lost every major acting award that he’s been up for this past year. That wouldn’t be an issue if Cooper didn’t seem to care so much.
If Cooper is finding out in real time that Hollywood doesn’t care how hard you work, he is also learning, in real time, another cold truth: There are few things people love to dislike more than an actor who talks endlessly about how hard they work.
The awards show circuit has galvanized the chortling and “get a load of this guy” quips during the Maestro press tour into mildly malicious glee at watching Cooper lose prize after prize. Screencaps of Cooper’s reaction after losing to Cillian Murphy at the Golden Globes and the SAGs have gone viral. Of course, no one but Cooper knows what’s going on in Cooper’s brain after these losses. But given the rounds he’s done in the media and spontaneous crying, his haters have created their own popular narrative about how much this must hurt a man who wants all the awards so bad.
Adding possible insult to injury, Murphy, who will probably beat Cooper at the Oscars this week, said it took him only six months to prepare for Oppenheimer. Six months is nothing compared to six years. (Although, if it helps, Murphy might not have been allowed to sit on set.)
The backlash against Cooper isn’t unlike the kind of conversations that surround fellow thespians Jared Leto and Jeremy Strong. People find their deep, serious commitment to the craft — which usually manifests in some sort of anecdote about method acting — annoying if not insufferable. It just seems so difficult for certain actors, whose professions are all about being perceived in very specific ways, to not be annoying. If their job is about faking it, why can’t they just fake this one thing a little bit? And if you’re lucky enough to be in the middle of an Oscars campaign, isn’t that part of the job?
Perhaps it’s because they’ve never really had to worry about it too much.
Actresses have found it more difficult than their male counterparts when it comes to likability. After winning Oscars in 2013, Anne Hathaway and Jennifer Lawrence were each dragged for trying so hard to be good at their jobs and acceptably charming in interviews. Every movie they’re in now seems to come with an implicit acknowledgment of how sexist and horrible we were to them back then.
For men, being annoying is usually forgiven if the final product is worth it. The quality of their movies has always been more important than whether or not they seem like fun to be around. That measure of quality is perhaps why certain actors (Daniel Day-Lewis) get a pass with being pretentious, and why an actor’s placing on the insufferable index isn’t permanent (Christian Bale seems to float in and out of it).
For actors-turned-directors, the pipeline is even more forgiving, provided the work turns out. Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson were both mocked for their first projects — Dances with Wolves was derided as “Kevin’s Gate,” a nod to the notoriously time-consuming film “Heaven’s Gate,” and Braveheart’s notoriously inaccurate history was a point of fun — but those jokes seemingly disappeared when the films became award winners. Similarly, Clint Eastwood’s career highs as a director have made it exponentially easier to forget some of the egregious stinkers he’s created or his outspoken politics.
Perhaps the prime model for actor-directors who tend to be a little embarrassing is Ben Affleck. Affleck seems to always be on the brink of anguish or on the verge of a cultural renaissance. His career is peppered with redemptive directorial highs like Gone Baby Gone, The Town, and Best Picture winner Argo; but also sad Batman, sad phoenix tattoo Affleck, and the saga of Bennifer 2.0. Instead of trying to fight the scrutiny, the mockery, and public perception, Affleck now simply states: I am who I am.
For Cooper, he’s always had the privilege of being more concerned with people liking the stuff he creates than people personally liking him. That’s what the New York Times profile got at: a guy who was so obsessed with the movie he made that he couldn’t help but sound like an absolute jerk about it.
Directing and acting in a movie is Cooper in his most honest form.
The problem is that this time around, Maestro isn’t stellar enough to warrant everything Bradley Cooper has been saying about the making of Maestro. This, of course, shouldn’t deter Cooper from directing, but if he focused on acting, just for a moment, it might make us believe that he doesn’t care quite as much as he clearly, painfully does.