Is Bradley Cooper the Caroline Calloway of the A-List?

By Chris Revelle | Film | January 23, 2024 |

By Chris Revelle | Film | January 23, 2024 |

The Oscar nominations are here and they’re as messy as ever! What a mixed bag of blessings and curses: America Ferrera nominated for Barbie but not Margot Robbie; Greta Lee snubbed for her heart-rending work in Past Lives; May December unrecognized in any of the acting categories; Sterling K. Brown, Lily Gladstone, and Coleman Domingo getting well-deserved nods; Ferrari and All of Us Strangers forgotten. One movie with an interesting push-and-pull of nominations is Maestro, a film our own Jason Adams described as a “craven affront:” nominated in both Best Actor and Best Actress as well as Best Picture but missing from Best Director. As I write this now, I’m sure there are no fewer than a kajillion reaction pieces being typed up that wonder what this means and questioning whether this is the time the Academy has killed their credibility or if they’ll finally be everything to everybody from Film Twitter to normies, but I feel confident in assuring you this: no one else is arguing that Bradley Cooper is the Caroline Calloway of Hollywood.

A brief reminder on Calloway: she’s a scammer who pops up every now and again to shill a book (or three). She literally sold an item called Snake Oil and counts on her cutely “owning” her scamming ways to charm you into giving her more money. Calloway is notable not for this but for how she attempted an Elizabeth Holmes-esque gambit: instead of creating something, she adopted the aesthetic of having done so and filled in the rest with lies and bullshit. There may be some desire to name this as a uniquely modern thing, but dilettantes with goals higher than they can achieve are not new. The important element here is that when the dilettante encounters the limits of their abilities, they feel they’re owed the highest accolades anyway. It’s a set-up for classic vainglory: when someone can’t cut it, they just pretend they can and did and would you please recognize them now?

Bradley Cooper is the Caroline Calloway of A-List Hollywood because he’s a dilettante who seems to believe he deserves an Oscar not for any specific film or performance he’s crafted but as a recognition of his talents in general. The man has made just two films as a director, and yet the framing of Maestro as “a Bradley Cooper film” implies he’s a proven auteur with some indelible and identifiable fingerprint. It feels like a rush to recognize Cooper this way like we’re treating him as a new all-time great well before we’ve seen much of his work. The perception that he wants these awards quite badly, enough to take shots at a fellow nominee, colors this too: does he simply want the thing or has he earned it? It would be one thing if this kind of vanity and glory-hounding produced great or even interesting work, but I would argue these instincts subtract from Cooper’s projects. A Star Is Born appears to forget who the actual “star” in question is; though Allie is the star being born, Cooper’s Jackson is framed as better with more “genuine” music and even after the character is dead, the movie spends most of its time missing him and is lesser for it. With Maestro, Cooper pulled out all the hackneyed “Oscar bait” stops such as potential white-washing and extraneous physical transformation with that racist fake nose. There are so many trappings of prestige, so many elements being thrown onto the table to tell you this is a serious artist who needs urgent recognition that it may occur to you that this message might’ve been better expressed through his work.

Instead of this strange play-acting, where Cooper pretends he’s already reached Warren Beatty level, one wishes he would simply do the work. It seems like Beatty’s path is the one Cooper most wants to follow, but there was an intent to Beatty’s work beyond seeking awards. Kayleigh Donaldson put it like this in the Pajiba writers’ Slack: “Beatty, for all of his egomania, had a philosophy.” What is Cooper’s? What is his intent as an artist? What messages does he want to impart? Does either of his movies indicate a perspective beyond inviting you to bask in Cooper’s supposed brilliance? When you consider how long Cooper attempted to stretch the relevance of A Star is Born, you get the impression that he expected an even more awe-inspired reaction than that smash hit got, as if we did not exalt enough in this gift he bestowed upon us. With how one movie later, we’re already using phrases like “a Bradley Cooper film” it feels like we’re being told how worthy Cooper is instead of being shown through his work. It feels as if the marketing machinery tasked with selling the prestige of Cooper is at least twice as large as his actual artistic output. In this way, Cooper becomes Calloway: the work stands far shorter than the stack of accolades being sought, there is more evident effort in seeming like an artist than in being one. The goal, it seems to me, is to skip the part where you hone your craft and develop yourself and land right on the part where people breathlessly greet your brilliance. It seems to me that Cooper wants to be seen as a great artist much more than he wants to be a great artist.

In a field where we have more women and people of color than usual nominated as actors and directors alongside Cooper, it feels like a mistake to hand awards to the cis-het white man who’s already known considerable success in Hollywood, even setting aside whether he deserves it. A white man with an outsized concept of his own talents is a dime-a-dozen (just ask me!), and I hope this year we don’t hand awards to Cooper simply because it’s plausible to do so. In time Cooper may develop into the great artist he pretends to be, but that time doesn’t come now simply because he wants it to.