Will ‘Maestro’ finally get Bradley Cooper that elusive Golden Globe?

In 2019, “A Star is Born” went into the Golden Globes as a heavy favorite to win multiple awards, including Best Drama Picture, Best Drama Actor for Bradley Cooper, and Best Drama Actress for Lady Gaga. However, come Golden Globes night, the film was snubbed in almost every category. “Bohemian Rhapsody” won both Best Drama and Best Drama Actor (for Rami Malek) while Glenn Close won Best Drama Actress for “The Wife.” The only Globe that “A Star is Born” managed to win was Best Original Song for “Shallow” (for Gaga, Mark Ronson, Anthony Rossomando, and Andrew Wyatt).

Cooper starred in that movie as well as directed, produced, and co-wrote it (with Eric Roth and Will Fetters). He returns to the Globes arena this year with another movie he made as a multi-hyphenate: Netflix’s “Maestro.” This one is also a drama about music as it depicts the marriage between composer Leonard Bernstein (Cooper) and Felicia Montealegre (Carey Mulligan).

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Again, like “A Star is Born,” “Maestro” goes into the Globes as one of the most nominated movies. It has four nominations in total — for Best Drama, Best Director for Cooper, Best Drama Actor for Cooper, and Best Drama Actress for Mulligan. The fact that Cooper got into the Best Director lineup tells us how much HFPA voters loved this movie.

For the second time in a Cooper-directed film, Cooper and his leading lady (Mulligan this time) go into the Globes with high chances of winning their categories.

Mulligan is nominated alongside Lily Gladstone (“Killers of the Flower Moon”), Sandra Hüller (“Anatomy of a Fall”), Greta Lee (“Past Lives”), Annette Bening (“Nyad”), and Natalie Portman (“May December”). Mulligan is in joint second place with Hüller while we are currently predicting Gladstone to win.

Cooper, meanwhile, is nominated alongside some fierce competition: Cillian Murphy (“Oppenheimer”), Leonardo DiCaprio (“Killers of the Flower Moon”), Colman Domingo (“Rustin”), Andrew Scott (“All of Us Strangers”), and Barry Keoghan (“Saltburn”). We are predicting Cooper to win this category.

So, we think that “Maestro” will win one out of two of the drama acting races. However, could we see another “A Star is Born” scenario play out where both Cooper and his leading lady lose their bids? Mulligan isn’t expected to win but Cooper is. Could he lose? Well, he doesn’t seem like a lock, that’s for sure. There is certainly some wiggle room for his competitors to take advantage of — chiefly, Murphy.

The Irish actor plays J. Robert Oppenheimer in Christopher Nolan‘s epic biopic and he has gained plenty of supporters so far this awards season. In fact, we are predicting that “Oppenheimer” will win several Golden Globes: Best Drama, Best Director for Nolan, Best Supporting Actor for Robert Downey Jr, and Best Original Score. If it wins those four bids, it seems reasonable that Murphy could also emerge victorious in something of a sweep for “Oppenheimer.”

“Maestro,” meanwhile, is ranked fairly lowly in all of its other nominated categories, meaning Best Drama Actor would be the film’s only win even if Cooper did manage to triumph. But if Murphy did win and “Oppenheimer” also locked up those other bids, that would mean a sweep of five Golden Globes. We don’t often see sweeps like this at this awards group. The last time such a sweep happened was in 2017 when “La La Land” won seven awards. Other than that, in the last 10 years, only one other film has won more than three Golden Globes. That was “Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri” in 2018, which won four gongs.

The past three winners of Best Drama Actor have all been their film’s sole winners at the Globes: Austin Butler (“Elvis”), Will Smith (“King Richard”), and Chadwick Boseman (“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom”). That indicates that voters may like to split their awards among multiple performers. That benefits Cooper. However, over the last 10 years, the waters are a little muddier. Five of the last 10 winners of this category have been their film’s sole winner while the other half have been one of at least two wins their films have managed. Will the Globes continue the recent trend of splitting up winners or will we see a return to a sweep?

The truth is, there is little to split between Murphy and Cooper. They both play real people in cinematically-rich biopics that transcend the genre and both utilise transformative accents. Cooper goes one step further in terms of transformation thanks to masterful prosthetic work but these are two performances cut from the same cloth, on paper. It could be a close call.

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