Gaga and Cooper should be ashamed
I have seen newlyweds walk down the aisle after exchanging vows who did not look as madly in love as Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga at the Academy Awards.
Technically, what we were watching at that moment on Sunday night was a musical “duet,” not a singular and volcanic expression of carnal desire. Cooper and Gaga were “singing,” not flirting in a prehistoric language no human can decipher. This was a public “performance,” not a personal showcase of longing. They were belting out “Shallow” from A Star Is Born, for which Gaga, a short time later, won the Oscar for Best Original Song and great, congratulations, so well deserved.
Now let’s get to the elephant in the Dolby Theatre on Sunday, which was the 5,000 kilos of sexual chemistry between these two consummate professionals who allegedly have never consummated anything between the ivory sheets.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting these “friends” are “friends with benefits.” I’m not speculating Ms. Lady has ever been, ahem, Cooped up with Bradley’s Little Monster as he turned the pages of her Silver Linings Playbook. That would be irresponsible and kind of gross. All I’m saying is most porno directors could never simulate the erotic tension Cooper and Gaga exuded for the world to see.
No future Hollywood sex tape will ever telegraph as much heat as that duet.
When the Oscars were over, I gazed at my wife the way Cooper had looked at Gaga two hours earlier. I got real close. I did not blink. I stared into her soul. I tried to lean my head on her shoulder. I forced my retinas to do the talking: “Honey, our time is now. Baby, do you feel what I feel? Sweetheart, as we stand here before bedtime — crap, did one of us remember to pack school lunches for tomorrow? — the mountains are crumbling and the oceans are dying and the moon has tumbled from the indigo sky. All that exists is me and you and this magical filament between us that shall never, ever be extinguished. Come closer, my love. I feel something.”
My wife furrowed her brow and asked if I had food poisoning.
And this is my problem with Sunday’s show-stopping performance.
There is no question Cooper and Gaga delivered the most memorable Oscar musical performance in years, including Sunday’s opening with Queen and Adam Lambert.
Cooper and Gaga were psychosexually plugged into another dimension when they strode onstage, holding hands, as his girlfriend Irina Shayk bravely looked on from the front row with the feigned enthusiasm of a vegan at a hot dog-eating contest.
But this duet, which was promptly celebrated as “compelling,” “magnetic” and “incredible beyond words,” also set the love bar way too high for mere mortals who are in actual relationships. The “platonic” bond between Cooper and Gaga now amounts to a slap in the face for every couple on this planet. They were onstage together for, what, about four minutes? And, yet, those 240 seconds felt like an eternity in which the boundaries of love and commitment were disfigured.
In about three months, if news breaks that Lady Gaga is pregnant with Cooper’s baby, no one who watched that duet will be gobsmacked. I think he may have knocked her up just with his smouldering gaze. Those two were not singing together; they were pantomiming a sexual bond for the ages. This was not a duet; it was a crescendo of lust, mutual respect and yearning.
And performance or not, that duet was an assault on the rhythms of any normal relationship. No real couple can possibly be expected to match Cooper’s and Gaga’s chemistry from this day forward. More important, no real couple should be exposed to a fictional love so pure it wreaks havoc on quotidian expectations.
Frankly, it’s disgusting. Cooper and Gaga should be ashamed of themselves.
These two “just friends” made a mockery of what it means to be in a “real relationship,” which is to say, they were carrying on like long-term commitment is all champagne and fireworks when the truth is it’s more like light beer and the occasional power outage. Relationships are hard work. But the glittering illusion of the possible relationship they presented on Sunday was terrifyingly easy.
“There’s not a single person on the planet that could have sang this song with me but you,” said Lady Gaga, as she accepted her Oscar after their performance, as Cooper and his girlfriend applauded with varying degrees of sincerity.
Me, I want to see these two perform a duet after they’ve actually lived together for two decades. Let’s see you hit those high notes if and only if you’ve proven to be compatible and ironclad to the endless strains of a real relationship.
Until then, the spark between Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga on Sunday was an inferno of insufferable deceit. This fake couple gives real love a bad name.