Having seen many of the big Oscar-bait films and potential “Best Actor” performances, I really do believe that the Best Actor race will come down between Paul Giamatti (The Holdovers) and Cillian Murphy (Oppenheimer). While Leo DiCaprio was good enough to get an Oscar nom for Killers of the Flower Moon, he wasn’t good enough to be a real contender this year. There are other men in the mix – hopefully Jeffrey Wright in American Fiction – but I think we can safely say that Bradley Cooper is the dude who wants it the most. He wants to be nominated for Maestro and he wants to win. He’s doing everything he can to get nominated, to put himself in the Oscar conversation. Well, everything but turn in an Oscar-worthy performance in a good film. All he’s got is a hilariously offensive fake nose and claims that he spent years learning how to conduct an orchestra just like Leonard Bernstein:

Much of the buzz around Bradley Cooper‘s “Maestro” so far has revolved around his shocking physical transformation into famed conductor Leonard Bernstein, but the actor-director-writer’s prep for the role might also blow some people away. Speaking at a recent Los Angeles screening for the film in a conversation moderated by “Hamilton” Tony-winner Lin-Manuel Miranda, Cooper revealed that he spent a whopping six years learning how to conduct just over six minutes of music in the style of Bernstein himself so he could record a crucial scene in “Maestro” live on set.

The scene in question recreates Bernstein’s famous conducting of the London Symphony Orchestra at the Ely Cathedral in 1976. The sequence is the film’s most rousing, as it fully showcases Bernstein’s musical genius and shows off Cooper’s staggering performance in all its full-bodied glory.

“That scene I was so worried about because we did it live,” Cooper said at the event (via IndieWire). “That was the London Symphony Orchestra. I was recorded live. I had to conduct them. And I spent six years learning how to conduct six minutes and 21 seconds of music.”

“I was able to get the raw take where I just watched Leonard Bernstein [conduct] at Ely Cathedral with the London Symphony Orchestra in 1976. And so I had that to study,” Cooper added, while also thanking “wonderful teachers” such as Metropolitan Opera director Yannick Nézet-Séguin for helping him fine-tune the performance.

“Nézet-Séguin made videos with all the tempo changes, so I had all of the materials to just work on.” Cooper said. “It was really about dialing exactly what I wanted cinematically and then inviting them into then inhabit that space and trusting that they have all done the work. Because I think that I knew I was terrified, absolutely terrified that if I hadn’t done the work then I wouldn’t be able to enjoy myself in these scenes. And everybody did.”

[From Variety]

It took him six years to learn how to fake-conduct an orchestra for six minutes? I’m sorry but Lydia Tar did it better. The fact that Maestro came out one year after Cate Blanchett’s incredible turn as the fictional Lydia Tar is hilarious to me – Cate’s conducting scenes were brilliant and she didn’t spend months bragging about any kind of tortuous, years-long process to get into character.

Photos courtesy of Jason McDonald/Netflix, Backgrid and screencap from the trailer.