6 Reasons Why A Star Is Born Stumbled This Season (and 1 Reason for Optimism)
https://www.vulture.com/2019/02/oscars-2019-why-star-is-born-is-getting-snubbed.html
1. The Remake Factorshare
Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that many of the film’s most fervent fans were younger viewers who were less familiar with the earlier versions. While none of the other Stars scored big with Oscar, either, for older audiences the mere presence of three predecessors may have made some second-guessing inevitable. Was Lady Gaga really in the same ballpark as Judy Garland? Wasn’t Bradley Cooper less hot than Kris Kristofferson? (The latter comes courtesy of my mother, who is not an Academy member, but I suspect her thinking might be representative.) When you know exactly where the movie’s going to end up, you may enjoy the ride of the first half a little less. And speaking of …
2. The Ending
Most of this year’s strongest contenders nail their third acts. Roma sends viewers out after two emotionally draining long takes. Bohemian Rhapsody has that whopper of a Live Aid reenactment. Even Green Book hits you with an unexpected, perfect punch line. But, like The Favourite, Star loses a bit of steam toward the end, and the big showstopping closer, “I’ll Never Love Again,” isn’t quite the emotional slam dunk that “Shallow” is. A weak ending isn’t fatal for a Best Picture contender — see: Return of the King — but if you’re positioning yourself as one of the best movies of the year, it helps to send audiences out on a high.
3. The Early Peak
Mario Kart veterans know you don’t want to be leading a race by too much too early, lest you be hit with the dreaded blue shell. A similar effect may have happened here. After First Man crashed, A Star Is Born had the Best Picture conversation to itself for the first two months of the season. That initially seemed like a blessing, but it’s also a lot of time for people who didn’t love the film to be confronted with headlines calling it the biggest, bestest, most Oscar-y movie of the year. This wasn’t exactly in the movie’s control, but Champagne problems are problems, too.
4. The Campaign
Warner Bros. has a long reputation of being a filmmaker-friendly studio, and by many accounts Bradley Cooper was in the driver’s seat of Star’s campaign. Recently the precise angle and tenor of that campaign was the subject of industrywide ex post facto discussion. The movie’s team has been pushing back hard on the idea that Cooper didn’t get out there enough — his people told IndieWire that his press schedule was 17 pages long, and while he didn’t do the parade of meet and greets that helped Peter Farrelly and Alfonso Cuarón win over voters, Cooper himself pointed out that he sat for plenty of Q&As. Still, it does seem clear that Cooper’s eye was on the Best Director prize, not Best Actor. The focus was on the film and the process, rather than a personality-driven acting campaign. (He also took pains to distance his own image from that of Jackson Maine.) Due to the increasingly international bent of the Academy’s directing branch, this appears in retrospect to have been the wrong play, and there are those in Hollywood who believe that the season’s Best Actor trophies could have been his with a different kind of campaign. The campaign he did run was not helped along by an early New York Times profile that painted Cooper as a serious artist who had little patience for the kind of politicking the season demanded. (I heard at the time that the actor’s camp was very unhappy with the piece, and months later Cooper pronounced himself “baffled” by the “disappointing” story.) It all added up to an inescapable narrative, that Team Star were Oscar parvenues who, out of pride or ignorance, weren’t playing the game the right way — underlined by the Lady Gaga “100 people in the room” quote, which went viral because of how perfectly it lined up with these preexisting notions.
5. The Politics
A Star Is Born aims for a kind of classical Hollywood timelessness, a throwback to the days when films were carried by big stars and big emotions. The campaign honed in on this point: “There are movies we admire, but there is just one we feel.” In a field where Roma, Black Panther, and BlacKkKlansman were all positioning themselves as breakthroughs in representation, and even crowd-pleasers like Green Book and Bohemian Rhapsody could claim that they were addressing intolerance, it made a certain amount of sense for Star to claim the apolitical lane all to itself. But as wins for Moonlight and Shape of Water have shown, voters like to feel like they’re sending a message with their Best Picture choice, and — recent attempts to claim that the movie was actually about mental health notwithstanding — Star Is Born never made that sale.
6. The Globes
The first sign that Star’s journey would not be an endless parade of wins came at the Golden Globes, where the heavily favored film came away with only a single trophy, in Best Song.