Why the Oscars will go Gaga for ‘A Star Is Born’
Some old stories have a knack for finding new ways to be told. In 1937, William A Wellman’s classic Hollywood rise-and-fall romance A Star Is Born was screened at the fifth Venice International Film Festival, where it was nominated for – though didn’t win – the Best Foreign Film award. The following March, it was nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, and won one – Best Writing, Original Story – as well as a Special Prize for its colour photography.
Wellman’s film would be remade twice in the following four decades – first as a musical by George Cukor in 1954, starring James Mason and Judy Garland (six Oscar nods, no wins), and again in a rock-and-roll milieu by Frank Pierson in 1976, with Kris Kristofferson and Barbra Streisand (four nods, one win – for Best Original Song, of course). All three were celebrated in their time, though it is the Cukor version that has been canonised as the classic, perhaps in part because Garland’s own story chimed so painfully with the narrative. Back in Venice this year, A Star Is Born was born again: this time starring Bradley Cooper and Stefani Germanotta, aka the pop star Lady Gaga, as a bewhiskered and boozy rocker and his clarion-voiced lover-stroke-protégé. The new version of the film, directed by Cooper, was one of the sensations of the festival among both audiences and critics: it took no prizes, but that was because it premiered out of competition, presumably because Warner Bros were loath to count their chickens when the programme was drawn up.
Well, the chickens are clucking now. As is often the way at Venice, the film’s Oscar potential became an instant talking point, and my own sense is the sky could be the limit. Nominations for Best Picture, Director, Lead and Supporting Actor and Lead Actress categories all seem likely, while nods for Cinematography, Adapted Screenplay and the two sound awards no one really understands wouldn’t feel like much of a stretch. And trust me that Shallow, the film’s chandelier-shattering signature ball ad, has best original song sewn up.
But as well as an awards-season front-runner, the film feels like a sure-fire hit – two categories that haven’t much overlapped of late. A recent study by the New York Times revealed that in the last 30 years, only four Best Picture-winning films have also been the most popular release of their year: Rain Man, Forrest Gump, Titanic and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Kin And this is a problem for the Oscars in so far as people only tend to tune in to cheer on films they have actually seen. The ceremony has recently been dominated by smaller, independent productions, while the Best Picture category itself has remained to date a superhero no-go zone.
The Academy attempted a fix in 2009 by expanding the field, after Christopher Nolan’s highly regarded second Batman film, The Dark Knight, failed to secure a Best Picture nomination. But members by and large just voted for more independent films, which made matters worse: now there were twice as many contenders the average cinemagoer hadn’t heard of. This August, they came up with another solution: a new category honouring “outstanding achievement in popular film”, presumably to ensure this year’s box-office-busting superhero production, Marvel’s Black Panther, wouldn’t suffer the same fate as The
Dark Knight. But the move was (rightly) decried as hugely patronising – when you distinguish between “popular” and “good”, suddenly neither feels much like a compliment – and earlier this month, the plan was sheepishly shelved.
But might the Academy’s muchlonged-for “Oscars for the people” turn up of its own accord? A Star Is
Born isn’t the only great studio film to have surfaced on the autumn festival circuit with both box-office and Oscar appeal. Universal’s forthcoming Neil Armstrong biopic First Man is another beautifully crafted, star-driven production with spectacle and substance in equal supply – as reportedly is Steve McQueen’s heist thriller Widows, which 20th Century Fox are treating as a mainstream pre-Christmas release, rather than just another indie acquisition to be crammed into the “awards corridor” of January and February, when the campaign season hits its stride.
An Oscar season led by box-office hits is a story Hollywood will be relieved to tell again. But the ending isn’t much of a twist: in order for films like A Star Is Born to win awards, you have to make them first. If 2019 proves to be the year the Oscars re-embrace the mainstream, it will be because the studios gave them a mainstream to embrace.