flipp525 wrote
I’ve heard that Bradley Cooper doesn’t really do enough in Licorice Pizza to get in. One of the Don’t Look Up actors seems like a better fit there.
I didn't really write about Bradley Cooper because I was more caught up in the film than its Oscar chances.
Bradley Cooper does not have enough to do in this film but he is hilarious. It is slightly, slightly conceivable that if this film goes over very big that Cooper gets nominated because his entire performance is so funny. But a third of his performance is real-time in the trailer. His Jon Peters shows up for no reason in the film whatsoever. He provides a weird obstacle for the characters, acts like a total creepy weirdo, and disappears. If he does get nominated, it'll be because the film taps into Bradley Cooper's best qualities. He's excellent at playing manic truth-tellers slightly out of touch with the rest of the world, like in every David O. Russell movie. This character is actually very similar to his American Hustle character. So... maybe there's a slight precedent like Michael Shannon in Revolutionary Road? But unlike that character, this character is utterly purposeless.
To give a better sense:
One could make the argument that Hoffman is the protagonist of the first half of Licorice Pizza while Haim is the protagonist of the second half of Licorice Pizza (one could also interview departing members of the audience to find out why doing shit like that is frustrating). But I digress, the first half is an adorable, although increasingly meandering, love story between an ambitious high schooler (Hoffman) and a twenty-something approaching a dead-end (Haim). Then it becomes the dead-ender's story a little bit as she's trying to figure out what she wants out of her life. This journey sends her or them through three male figures that serve as fraudulent male sexual harbingers of her life to come: Sean Penn plays "Jack" (?) Holden, a middle-aged fraud who hits on her but is caught up in his own illusions of stardom; Bradley Cooper plays Jon Peters, a sex-addicted narcissist who loves his privilege but admits sex with Barbra Streisand "gets a little dull," and Benjamin Safdie plays Joel Wachs, an ambitious young politician who wants to make the city a better place but is also hiding a double-life as a closeted gay man and is thus a fraud. Because all of these characters show up in the second half of the film and none of them really hang around, they're both fun but in an arbitrary way.
To contrast, let's look at Lady Bird. Lady has two would-be suitors over the course of this film but because the film is substantially more focused, Lucas Hedges shows up in the first half, serves his purpose as a would-be suitor, and disappears from focus but continues to hang around. In the first half of the story, Timothée Chalamet is set up as another would-be suitor whom Lady could have feelings for but she's currently involved with Hedges, so she circles back to him later in the second half, he serves his purpose, and then disappears.
Had any of those aforementioned characters a similar plot functionality to the would-be suitors in Lady Bird, I think they could get nominated and win, but they don't. If Cooper gets nominated, it will be through a fanatical passion on Academy voters for this film (which I don't think the end result will inspire) or a total lack of options (which I don't see).
Alana Haim has a shot at a nomination. Cooper Hoffman will probably get a Golden Globe nomination. He is quite good in the film.
