With the 91st Oscars less than three weeks away, A Star Is Born helmer Bradley Cooper will have succeeded in “just getting through” awards season, as he put it to Oprah Winfrey during a taping of the media mogul’s SuperSoul Conversations on Tuesday at the PlayStation Theater in New York City.
“It’s just the icing on the cake to be able to work with people, and having them be recognized by the Academy for A Star Is Born is incredible,” Cooper said of the recognition for the film.
However, the actor-turned-director said that for him, nominations and awards “play into things that have nothing to do with creative art.”
“It’s a whole other element of the business,” he said. “So, it’s really reconciling its effect on you. That’s the thing I have to deal with.”
Winfrey told Cooper she was surprised to see him left out of the Oscars’ best director category. Cooper, on the other hand, was not.
“I’m never surprised about not getting anything. But it’s funny you ask this, because I’ve thought about this,” he said. “I was with my friend at a coffee shop in New York City, and I looked down at my phone, and Nicole [Caruso, Cooper’s publicist] had texted me congratulations on these other things but didn’t tell me the bad news. And I went, ‘Oh, wow.’ And the first thing I felt was embarrassment, actually. Think about it. I felt embarrassed that I didn’t do my part.”
But in his reconciliation, Cooper realized that “even if I got the nomination, it should not give me any sense of whether I did my job or not. That’s the trick, to make something that you believe in.”
He continued, “The only thing I set out to do was to tap into as an authentic place as possible — in myself and everybody I asked to make this movie — to tell a human story of people who are going to deal with their family life, trauma as a child, addiction in a real way, love in this life and finding your voice.”
Cooper also opened up about the loss of his father after Winfrey asked what it was like to have him die in Cooper’s arms.
“It was everything,” he said. “It was the biggest gift he gave me — the second biggest gift. [The first was] having me and bringing me into this life and [then] him allowing me to be witness to his passing was equally as huge.”
Cooper added that “everything was different” after the moment in 2011.
“I stopped sweating stuff that I was sweating before that,” he said. “It changed the way I was as an actor by, like, the next day, and I just started to live my life in a different way.”
Winfrey’s SuperSoul Conversations will air Feb. 16 at 8 p.m. on OWN.
