Maybe if there were such a long list of great acting performances that one had to get cut out, Leo’s snubbing would make sense. But for Bradley Cooper? No ...
The Academy’s strange contempt for Martin Scorsese is a well-established phenomenon; the famed director has, as of today’s announcement, been nominated for the Oscar for Best Director ten times, winning only for 2006’s The Departed (one of my favorite movies, and an Oscar Scorsese really did deserve, especially when considering the other nominees, but not his best work), and not for hall-of-fame level films like Goodfellas or Raging Bull.
His newest film, Killers of the Flower Moon, his best since 2013’s The Wolf of Wall Street, I’d argue, received a healthy ten nominations ranging from Best Picture to Lily Gladstone in the Best Actress category (an award she should win, though might lose to Emma Stone for the latter’s performance in Poor Things) to Rodrigo Prieto’s nomination for Best Cinematography. Given the strength of Oppenheimer in the pre-Oscars awards shows — it won the Critics’ Choice Award for Best Picture, the Golden Globe for Best Motion Picture – Drama, and a host of regional contests’ trophies for top film of 2023 — Marty will likely be shut out in a situation not unlike the one he faced with The Irishman in 2019, for which he and his team were heavily nominated but left the Dolby Theatre empty-handed.
But it isn’t Scorsese’s history with the Academy that should be, at the very least, curious to those following awards season. Leonardo DiCaprio, star of Killers of the Flower Moon, was not nominated for Best Actor. It isn’t the first time he’s been wronged by Oscar voters: Famously bereft of a statue for most of his career as an A-list star, Leo won his first for The Revenant, released in 2015 and neither his best performance nor a particularly good film, to be quite honest — his best performances having been in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, The Aviator, and especially the three-hour sprint that was The Wolf of Wall Street — but it was a long time coming for the most consistent actor of his generation who Hollywood’s kingmakers had unjustly ignored. After watching Killers of the Flower Moon, I had to move his turn as a dimwitted and perhaps unwitting serial murderer into the top three (replacing his portrayal of Howard Hughes).
It isn’t Leo’s snubbing that I find most offensive in a vacuum (though I do think it’s a bad choice on the part of the nominating committee). Maybe it would have been understandable if there had been a deluge of outstanding acting performances, a list so long that someone deserving had to get cut out. The biggest insult is who ostensibly took his place among the five actors nominated. Cillian Murphy and Paul Giamatti, the dual front-runners for their roles in Oppenheimer and The Holdovers, respectively, certainly deserved their nominations, and there are strong cases to be made for American Fiction’s Jeffrey Wright and Rustin’s Colman Domingo, as well.
But Bradley Cooper? Come on.
Maestro wasn’t very good, and Cooper’s performance did not merit a nomination (maybe the Academy feels bad for leaving him off the Best Director ballot for A Star is Born five years ago) unless the award is “most gratuitous close-up shots in black-and-white.” For the best take on the film I’ve read, and one I’m comfortable assuming is the best out there, read John Podhoretz’s review of Maestro in the Washington Free Beacon:
He tried to mimic everything about Bernstein, which led to hours every day in the makeup chair turning himself unrecognizable. Unfortunately, his effort to capture Bernstein’s voice ends up sounding less like Lenny and rather more like Robert Evans, the movie producer whose spoken version of his own The Kid Stays in the Picture remains the high-water mark of all autobiographical audiobooks.
There’s one line here I’ll never forget, because he sounds so much like Evans and the line is so peculiar. “Who left the Snoopy in the vestibule?” Cooper says as he enters the apartment for the Thanksgiving fight with his wife, holding a stuffed toy. Vestibule? Seriously? Cooper wants to sound cultivated, but in the end, he sounds Evanated.
Much as Snoopy doesn’t belong in the vestibule, Bradley Cooper doesn’t belong in the Best Actor race, and that he’s in and Leo’s out is a travesty we should recognize.