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Why Maestro Became the Oscar Villain (and Oppenheimer Didn’t)
Everyone is rooting against a big, starry awards-season movie — for reasons that have nothing to do with the film’s politics.
I caught up with the Leonard Bernstein biopic a week after it played the New York Film Festival in October, and while it wasn’t my favorite of this year’s awards crop, I admired the formal inventiveness, the commitment to period mannerisms, and Bradley Cooper ’s evident love of flirting onscreen. What makes this even funnier is that the film that is dominating all comers this season is Oppenheimer — another warts-and-all biopic of a Great Man from the 20th century, which also features a jumbled timeline and black-and-white cinematography, and whose director is likewise often accused of taking himself too seriously. Though I’ve heard whispers that Team Oppenheimer were not the biggest fans of the meme, which they felt trivialized the tragedy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, there’s no doubt the summer phenomenon inoculated Christopher Nolan’s film from an Oscar-villain backlash.
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