I was fairly shocked when Bradley Cooper‘s A Star Is Born lost the SAG ensemble award last night. I also heard a resounding THUD sound. Because this, to me, seemed like the final kiss of death — i.e., SAG being unable to give this popular musical drama a “poor baby, we still love you” award.
An obviously well made, convincingly performed and hugely successful romantic tragedy, ASIB had consistently failed to win anything big — no Best Picture or directing or acting awards — at the Golden Globes, the Critics Choice Awards or the Producers Guild Awards. So before last night the thinking was “okay, no Best Picture Oscar and no acting Oscars for Cooper or Lady Gaga, but SAG members surely feel sorry for A Star Is Born, and so they’ll probably give it a Best Ensemble award as a kind of consolation prize.”
Nope!
Obviously no one knows anything for sure about the final Oscar tallies, but the Academy Award ambitions of Cooper’s grand musical opus are almost surely dead, dead, deader than dead.
So what killed the award-season chances of what had seemed — on paper at least — like a film that might do exceptionally well with award-season voters and handicappers — a film that was obviously well crafted, expertly refined, beloved by audiences and extraordinarily successful all over ($206 million domestic, $413 million worldwide).
In a phrase, A Star Is Born was way overhyped in the early stages, and that avalanche of pre-release praise produced feelings of irritation (at least as far as Hollywood Elsewhere was concerned) and a kind of “oh, yeah? show us!” attitude among many others.
That plus the fact that it just seemed wrong, wrong, WRONG to give a Best Picture Oscar to a remake of a remake of a remake of a 1932 original.
Warner Bros. publicity, obviously, was the architect of the overhype. Their hubris bears the responsibility.
The first clue came when Warner Bros. decided not to show ASIB in Telluride — a decision that said “we know this is basically a hoi polloi popcorn movie, so we don’t want any critical slams coming out of an elite rarified setting.”
But if you want to focus on overhyping faces and personalities, A Star Is Born was primarily killed by the Murderer’s Row quartet of Robert De Niro, Sean Penn, Variety‘s Kris Tapley and Barbra Streisand.