Best Actor has a biopic problem

For months, Bradley Cooper had been pegged as a frontrunner for the Best Actor prize for his performance in A Star is Born. And why not?

Any of us who closely follow film awards — particularly those related to acting — know that they aren’t won simply on the basis of merit. For better or for worse, the annual rat race for these little gold statuettes can be equated to a cocktail with various ingredients, which include:

1. The amount of active campaigning one does throughout what is essentially a six month circuit, 
2. Whether or not the film and/or performance is any good, and
3. One's personal narrative: an overarching, supplementary account that may compel voters to think, "this person deserves it" 

Take, for example, Meryl Streep’s win for The Iron Lady — having been served twelve consecutive losses over the course of nearly thirty years, Streep's narrative was tied to this idea that it was simply time for the woman (a living legend, mind you) to be rewarded a third Oscar, if only so that it would materialistically confirm her status as the Best Actress of our Time.

Consider also, how the term "McConaissance" became apart of our vernacular throughout Matthew McConaughey's campaign in 2014. Having experienced a career lull that produced the likes of Fool's Gold and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, he'd rally with a significant run of acclaimed (if not artistically challenging and out-of-the-box) performances and films that included The Lincoln Lawyer, Bernie, Killer Joe, The Paperboy, Mud, Magic Mike, Dallas Buyers Club, The Wolf of Wall Street and True Detective. As the saying goes, everyone loves a good comeback story.

And what of Sandra Bullock, who, prior to 2009, was not exactly an actress one would consider as Oscar-friendly? The crux of how Bullock was propelled from Best Actress nonfactor-to-dark-horse-to-frontrunner-to-winner is tied to The Blind Side's surprising box-office success (and, osmotically, that summer's box-office success of The Proposal). Never mind that The Blind Side was a tepidly reviewed film and, for all intents and purposes, had no business being named the "best" of any film award category in 2009 — money talks, and considering The Blind Side's $200 million domestic gross marked the first time a film was marketed with a sole actress' name atop the title, Bullock was instantly positioned as a revered, underrated industry veteran with a strong track record of turning out moneymaking hits. Naturally, she needed to be rewarded.

So, back to Bradley Cooper. His narrative this year appeared as strong as any other. A Star is Born was Cooper's labor of love; in addition to starring in the film, he was also its director, its co-producer and its co-screenwriter. The man learned how to play the guitar and the piano, and went to a vocal coach in order to achieve the voice that we see in the film. He committed, methodically, to the concept of being a professional musician, storming the stages of Coachella and Glastonbury to sing live for the picture. In short, Cooper did the absolute most in bringing A Star is Born to life, and critics and audiences took notice. The film received rave reviews, became a meme-inducing phenomenon, and has generated over $400 million in box office receipts worldwide to date. Cooper's narrative is squarely tied to the overwhelming success of A Star is Born, impactful for its artistic genesis and its business triumphs.

And yet, here we are. Save for a directing win via the National Board of Review, Cooper has very little hardware to show for this far into awards season. A perplexing move to place A Star is Born into the Drama category at the Golden Globes garnered it no major wins outside of Best Song, with Cooper losing the Best Actor prize to Rami Malek in the equally-musical-yet-apparently-not-musical-enough-to-be-in-the-musical/comedy-category Bohemian Rhapsody. At the Critics Choice Awards, Cooper would lose Best Actor to Christian Bale in Vice. And on the morning of the announcement of the 91st Academy Award nominations, Cooper was served a surprise snub in the Best Director category, where he was heavily expected to appear. Just like that, A Frontrunner Is (seemingly) Dead. 

As RuPaul once said in the Snatch Game episode of All Stars 2: “well that don’t make no kind of sense.” And yet, these wins for Malek and Bale ought not have come as any sort of surprise. It’s a tide turn that aligns with a broader issue that has plagued the Best Actor category like a virus across all the mainstream awards bodies (Oscar, BAFTA, SAG, Globes) for just about a decade now, that being: awards bodies love it when actors play real people, and, as is oft the case, they tend to reward male actors who play real people. 

It’s an issue that has baffled and frustrated me for years, with seemingly no end in sight — why is it that accolades for male acting tend to sway toward biopics and "real-life" portrayals? Take a look at the male nominees since 2010:

And, for equal measure, a look at the female nominees:

It’s not my intention to generalize a performance as unworthy simply because they're real-life portrayals, and by no means do I believe that biopics/real-life portrayals are undeserving of prizes — Meryl Streep in The Post, Natalie Portman in Jackie and Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant are a few recent highlights that really resonated with me upon initial review. However, the ubiquity of "real-life" characters in the annual race for Oscars is a persistent irritant worth talking about, and it seems as though the appeal of flashy transformations into "real people" are too often favored, as if by reflex, over fictional characters in the Best Actor category. Just as the Academy is often criticized for nominating Streep by default for whatever film she has out during any given year, and just as how Ricky Gervais and Kate Winslet once joked that holocaust films guarantee you an Oscar, "real-life" characters in biopics — supplemented by prosthetics and makeup — are a nearly surefire albeit tired tactic for an actor to receive awards recognition.

Male performances that are rich, unique and provocative are routinely ignored by the Academy in favor of such biographical transformations. To this day, I'm still pissed about Jake Gyllenhaal's snub for Nightcrawler — despite the fact that he did quite a transformative number on himself for the film, he was edged out in the final hour for Steve Carell in Foxcatcher and/or Cooper in American Sniper. I still can’t reconcile how Daniel Day-Lewis seamlessly bulldozed his way through nearly every Best Actor prize his year for Lincoln, when you’ve got Joaquin Phoenix’s intense, fiery work in The Master right in the wings, largely praised and largely ignored for accolades (never mind that in the buildup to the Oscar nominations that year, Phoenix's placement in the category was far from a lock — pundits had predicted John Hawkes to get in for his polio-stricken, real-life portrayal of Mark O'Brien in The Sessions). And while I thought that 2013’s Best Actor lineup was among the best of this decade — I can’t help but feel as though there was a lazy collective admiration for McConaughey's performance in Dallas Buyers Club. I'm due for some rewatches myself, but at the time, I thought DiCaprio's Jordan Belfort in The Wolf of Wall Street and Ejiofor's Solomon Northup in 12 Years a Slave surprised more than McConaughey's AIDS-stricken Ron Woodroof. 

I worry that the writing is on the wall for Cooper. The science of narratives, how certain narratives stick and how it's all collectively determined that one individual "deserves" an Oscar over another is too senseless for me to wrap my head around. It's interesting, because in a lot of ways, Cooper's narrative does bear remnants of the aforementioned narratives of Streep, McConaughey and Bullock. A Star is Born, and its mammoth soundtrack, certainly has more monetary command than The Blind Side. Cooper, like McConaughey, has spent the better half of this past decade building out an impressive filmography of his own, doing his best to extinguish the reputation attained from films such as The Hangover franchise, The A-Team, All About Steve and The Wedding Crashers, in favor of more serious fare (Limitless, Silver Linings Playbook, American Hustle, American Sniper). And, with four acting nominations under his belt, you might argue that it's a bit more his "time" for a Best Actor Oscar as opposed to Malek (1 nomination) or Bale (4 nominations and 1 Supporting Actor win). The only avenue to which Cooper does not align is obviously in Jackson Maine being a fictional character.

One might argue that alcoholism is also an excessive trope often seen in Oscar nominated/winning performances (Jackson Maine himself is but an apple on the alcoholic-country-singer tree that includes Jeff Bridge's Bad Blake and Robert Duvall's Mac Sledge), and this is quite true. But I was very impressed by Cooper's soulful romanticism, and how it seeped through every pore of every frame he was in. I had a conversation with a friend of mine the other week after watching Bohemian Rhapsody; I mentioned that I preferred Cooper to Malek, to which my friend said that she thought Cooper was just "good" in A Star is Born, but when she saw Malek in Rhapsody she thought, "man, what a performance."

A general statement obviously, and I didn't pry for a more thorough analysis on her end, but one wonders if people get too easily lost in the flamboyance and conspicuousness of gimmicks such as Malek's gigantic teeth and Live Aid mimicry in Bohemian Rhapsody, or Bale's impossible-to-ignore body dysmorphia in Vice. I won't deny that Bale's uncanny resemblance to Cheney is dumbfounding, and seeing Malek in the throes of Queen's discography is pure, electrifying fun. Could it be that the general romanticism as seen in Jackson Maine is undervalued — seen as less impressive, less challenging — when lacking that obvious "transformation" for one to benchmark against a real life figure? Or, could it be that enough voters really, truly didn't care for Cooper altogether? I suppose it should be noted, since we are talking about narratives, that Bohemian Rhapsody too has brought in an ass-ton of money (over $800 million worldwide to date) while Vice's criticism of Republican politics and policy is transparently applicable to the times we currently live in.

The fact of the matter is, you see enough of these TRANSFORMATIVE! types of performances stronghold Best Actor (Lincoln, Dallas Buyers Club, The Theory of Everything, Darkest Hour, Foxcatcher, Trumbo, Steve Jobs, The Danish Girl, Ray, Capote, Invictus, Frost/Nixon, etc.), that at best, you begin to get bored with the category, while at worst, you start to question the integrity of the category altogether. It's obvious these films are made with gold trophies in mind, but do they continue to get made because awards bodies continue to perpetuate the theory? I'm willing to bet money that there were not swaths of people clutching their pearls for the arrival of another Winston Churchill picture, but Darkest Hour came anyway, and the rest was Best Actor history.

My earliest recollections of "transformations" as ammunition for acting prizes go back to Nicole Kidman in The Hours and Charlize Theron in Monster. Interestingly enough, the Academy rewarded several of its Best Actress winners for such performances throughout the aughts, more so than the men (though note that it was still prevalent in the Best Actor category):

That has changed since 2010. We've seen a shift toward fictional stories winning the top prize on the actress front. This trend could maintain or revert in the 2020s, but in an age where there's a constant barrage of big-budget superhero movies and franchises that spawn sequels, prequels and reboots, I will always root for quality, original storytelling. The Best Actor category is, to its own detriment, way too enamored with The Iron Ladys of the world — it would never see a Black Swan-esque fictional tale pick up traction (the closest would have been Michael Keaton in Birdman, but we all know how that went), and rarely does it see comedic, lighter wins a la Silver Linings Playbook or La La Land (though Jean Dujardin's win for The Artist rebukes this — emphasis on rarely!).

And, unlike the Best Actress category, Best Actor is inexplicably biased towards older men. Some of my favorite performances in contention in years past — Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler or Nocturnal Animals, Jacob Tremblay in Room, Ryan Gosling in Blue Valentine, Michael Fassbender in Shame all received nominations from awards bodies that weren't AMPAS. Performances that leaned a bit more towards the romantic, such as Gosling, Jean-Louis Trintignant in Amour, or Joel Edgerton in Loving, were not shortlisted for Oscars, though their female counterparts were. It's no surprise that Best Actress has produced some of the most inspired nominations since 2010, between foreign performances (Amour, Two Days, One Night, Elle, Roma) and Quvenzhané Wallis' nod in Beasts of the Southern Wild — while Best Actor has very little to show in the same vein.

Best Actor has a quality issue. It always has — watching the male performances nominated in the 1930s and 1940s is enough for one to reject the category altogether. For whatever reason, Oscar's idea of an "excellent" male performance is largely formulaic in makeup and archaic in substance. We don't always like 'em passionate, sensitive, flawed or problematic, but we really do like 'em when they're heroic figures, even more so when they're real people suffering from visually or vocally conspicuous conditions such as speech impediments, AIDS, or ALS. It's a shame, because men are just as capable of producing daring, galvanizing performances as much as women — the issue is that such performances simply do not get nominated.

By the end of tonight, we'll know for sure if Cooper stands a chance at recouping a comeback for Best Actor at the SAG Awards. I await a miracle, but I've accepted that it may very well be a battle between Freddie Mercury and Dick Cheney on February 24.

Closing out the decade, it looks like 2019 will provide us with The Irishman (Frank Sheeran/Jimmy Hoffa), Rocketman (Elton John), A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (Fred Rogers) and Ford vs. Ferrari (Ken Miles/Carroll Shelby) for prospective Best Actor contenders. Interestingly enough, Cooper has a Leonard Bernstein biopic in the pipeline — should he lose out for A Star is Born, Bernstein could very well be his ticket to Oscar gold.