Boy Movies #63

Boy Movies endorses Bradley Cooper, just generally

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The Academy Awards have come and gone. Were they good? Well, they never are, and now we live in a world where Emma Stone has two Oscars and I did badly on my office ballot, so you can imagine how I feel. I confess that the immense personal trauma caused by the amount of energy I invested in Austin Butler winning Best Actor last year, only for him to lose miserably to Brendan Fraser, left me pretty ambivalent this time around. It also happens that I had the rare experience of enjoying a lot of the nominated films, which obviously meant that the one I at first thought was middling and later decided was awful (Poor Things) won a bunch of stuff. C’est la vie!

Talking about the Oscars in this week’s issue is borderline pushing it. They happened a mere two days ago and they’re declining in relevance by the second. But I think a few interesting things happened within the boy movies space that seem worth addressing, if you’ll indulge me.

Who abandoned Snoopy in the vestibule?

My second favorite Irish-Italian American from the northeast¹ Bradley Cooper returned this year with his second directorial outing, Maestro, a somewhat ill-advised (by the world, not the Bernstein family) film about the life and career of Leonard Bernstein. I famously loved Maestro and I’m sure that a few years down the line I will eventually even decide it’s perfect, much like I did with A Star Is Born. I don’t believe Bradley Cooper is an auteur, I don’t believe that he has a strong point of view on anything, and I don’t believe he’s mentally sound. He’s an incredibly passionate, incredibly confident, and incredibly weird guy. He made a lot of big choices with Maestro, some of which worked and some of which did not, and yet I really don’t have a bad word to say about it. I recognize how annoying it is that this is the kind of thing that does it for me while something like Dune 2 sits with me like a mediocre cup of coffee — it sustains me for a spell, but I want it to be over as quickly as possible.

The vast majority of biopics (which Maestro is not, at least not in the traditional sense, but let’s call it a biopic for the sake of simplicity) are boy movies, due to a combination of hero worship and the male belief that the retelling of history is a duty that only a man could understand the gravity of. In the case of Maestro, it is quietly the boyest of the year’s offerings. A bold declaration in the era of Oppenheimer, yes, but stay with me: It’s incredibly boy for a handsome, successful actor to narcissistically decide that he must not only direct, not only (co-)write, but also star in a film about a complicated genius. It’s incredibly boy to publicly battle another crazy actor for the rights to the complicated genius’s life. It’s incredibly boy to direct and star in a movie about a complicated genius and ultimately make it about how much he loves his wife, even though cheating on her with men is his favorite hobby. It’s incredibly boy to decide that the success of this movie relies on doing an insane voice and wearing a fake nose.

Cooper clearly sees himself in Bernstein — two famous guys wrestling with their own fame — and there was a time where a boy movie of this nature with that sort of narrative would’ve cleaned up at the Oscars. “But maybe Maestro just isn’t good, Allison,” you might be thinking. That doesn’t matter! The Academy, the awards body that named Green Book Best Picture the same year A Star Is Born stormed the world stage, have never cared about what’s actually “good.” Maestro theoretically has all the pieces of the type of Hollywood biopic that the Academy used to flip for. And yet it flopped, sort of bafflingly. Cooper was once again not nominated for Best Director, which is the thing he wants most in the world, and Maestro didn’t take home any of the awards it was nominated for. The film comes in with a defensive “I’m going to show you how good I am and prove you all wrong” energy, but I’m not sure Cooper actually did prove it to the people he needed to prove it to. Maybe his confidence backfired. Maybe the combination of the nose and the voice overpowered the actual content of the film. Maybe Cooper is just too kooky, maybe his wild-eyed and earnest stories about spending his entire life training for the six-minute conducting sequence were just too much. Maybe he wanted it too bad. He’s trying to McConaughey, but every time he opens his mouth he says something odd. A boy movie made by a boy actor desperate to be taken seriously as a boy director… How does that not compel you?

The mystery of Maestro’s downfall will enrapture investigators for decades. But I’ll always know what happened with Snoopy in that vestibule… ✨ magic ✨

Who abandoned Scorsese in the Oscar voting window?

Academy disdain comes in different flavors. There’s the kind Bradley Cooper gets, there’s the kind women directors get, there’s the kind anyone who isn’t white gets. And then there’s the kind Martin Scorsese gets — the Beyoncé treatment, if you will. A new Scorsese film typically means two things: It will be nominated for a ton of Oscars and win exactly none. His single Academy Award win, which he finally won for directing The Departed after being nominated approximately 500 times, happened in 2006. About once a month, his “well, here we fuckin’ go” reaction to winning makes the rounds online.

Despite Killers and Oppenheimer being irritatingly grouped together as the year’s haha-why-were-they-so-long movies, Oppenheimer was the one to come out on top. These films, while about different things, exist in conversation with each other, both helmed by directors trying to wrestle with age-old American sins. Maybe voters found it easier to stomach the British-American Christopher Nolan’s slightly distanced perspective. Maybe, as Lyvie said, American voters were reluctant to award a film that forced them to look inward, or, as Nate Jones theorized, international voters didn’t connect to a story about the Osage murders. There are plenty of viewers who misunderstood Oppenheimer’s intentions, but I do wonder whether it’s the granular details of Killers that didn’t resonate with Oscar voters or a collective issue with Scorsese himself. It’s not as if this exact thing didn’t happen to The Irishman and Silence. It’s not even like his older films were huge hits with these people. If Maestro² was manufactured in the We Want Oscars factory and came out a little wrong, Scorsese’s films, historically, have not been concerned with appealing to awards voters. But I get why it seems more pointed this time around, especially as the insipid discussion about whether or not Lily Gladstone should have competed in the Best Actress category rages on.

It’s weird to talk about Oscars in terms of who “deserves” what because it’s so easy to make the case that almost anyone deserves anything. I’m out here semi-seriously claiming Bradley Cooper deserves an Oscar! None of this shit is real, and I can’t imagine Scorsese cares (he probably wouldn’t unfailingly show up to the ceremony each year if he really believed he was being disrespected), but it will always be strange that the Academy has eternally “always the bridesmaid, never the bride”-ed one of our greatest living directors.

Letters to the editor

This next section comes at the request of a beloved friend and reader:

Beloved friend and reader, I realize only now that I forgot to ask whether you meant Oscar movies across all of time or just the 2023-2024 Oscar movies. The former seems too difficult (my honest answer would probably just be Titanic three times), so I’m doing the latter.

1. Barbie. Relatable for an alien arriving on Earth, I imagine. Plus fun colors! Would Ryan Gosling still be considered hot in outer space? I’d like to know.

2. Oppenheimer. I can imagine an alien watching this movie and being like, “They’re inventing bombs down there? And using them on each other? Hahahaha! Idiots!”

3. May December. This movie has the potential to blow the minds of even the most advanced extraterrestrials. If an alien saw Natalie Portman deliver that mirror monologue I think it would spontaneously combust. An alien watching May December could be enough to stave off the threat of interplanetary war.

Honorable mention goes to Maestro. I kind of just want to know what a true freak of nature would say about it!

That’s it for this week. Let me know if you have any boy movies-related Oscar thoughts in the comments! Long live Cillian Murphy!!!

1. I’m my first favorite :)

2. Which, it’s worth noting, Scorsese produced.