The last time Bradley Cooper was a major contender at the Academy Awards was in 2019, when his film, “A Star is Born,” was nominated for best picture, actor and six other trophies.
For that ceremony, he invited his supermodel girlfriend Irina Shayk, the mother of his young daughter, to join him on the Oscars red carpet and to participate in some awkward photo ops with his co-star Lady Gaga.
US Model Gigi Hadid walks the runway to present a creation by Chanel during the Paris Fashion Week Womenswear Spring/Summer 2024 at the Grand Palais Ephemere in Paris on October 3, 2023. (Photo by Bertrand GUAY / AFP) (Photo by BERTRAND GUAY/AFP via Getty Images)
This year, Cooper is a contender again for his Leonard Bernstein biopic, “Maestro,” which he stars in and directed. But he’s not likely to walk the Oscars red carpet with his new supermodel girlfriend, Gigi Hadid, and it’s probably not because he’s become this year’s “Oscars villain” or because of her controversial pro-Palestine social media posts, according to Page Six.
Cooper may bring Hadid to an Oscars after-party, including the Vanity Fair shindig, which would be his way of “hard-launching” the relationship, Page Six.
HOLLYWOOD, CALIFORNIA – FEBRUARY 24: (L-R) Gloria Campano, Bradley Cooper and Irina Shayk attends the 91st Annual Academy Awards at Hollywood and Highland on February 24, 2019 in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images)
Still, they probably won’t walk the red-carpet together for that party, Page Six reported. As for the Oscars ceremony itself — and Hollywood’s biggest red carpet — a source told Page Six that the actor is likely to instead bring his mother, Gloria Campano. He usually brings Campano as his date to such high-profile vents, including to the 2019 Academy Awards, along with Shayk.
If Hadid doesn’t make the cut this year, it could be because Cooper’s romance with her is fairly new; they only began low-key dating in October, according to Page Six. A star like Cooper may think that five months is not enough time for him to want to publicize a new relationship on the Oscars red carpet.
It’s true that Hadid received some pretty intense backlash for the way she excoriated the Israeli government in pro-Palestine social media posts, following Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attacks and Israel launching deadly airstrikes on Gaza, according to the Daily Mail.
Hadid, whose father is Palestinian, apologized for not “fact-checking” certain accusations she made against Israel in the posts. The Daily Mail reported in December that Hadid feared that the backlash against her would spill over to Cooper and hurt his efforts to mount a successful Oscars campaign for “Maestro,” about the famed Jewish conductor.
It appears, though, that Hadid’s comments didn’t hurt “Maestro” at all; the film received seven total nominations. Unfortunately for Cooper, he didn’t receive his coveted best director nomination, snubbed again in that category as he was in 2019. Cooper also isn’t a frontrunner for the best actor award. That distinction belongs to Cillian Murphy for “Oppenheimer,” followed by Paul Giametti for “The Holdovers.” “Oppenheimer” also is expected to win best picture.
Industry experts also say that Cooper didn’t do himself any favors with his mode of campaigning this season.
On “The Town” podcast, host Matthew Belloni named the Oscars campaign for “Maestro” one of the worst of the season. Both he and New Yorker writer Michael Schulman agreed that Cooper made himself this year’s “Oscars villain” with his “try-hard” persona, in which he showed that he “wants an Oscar so badly we should probably just give him one to prevent a psychotic break.”
They both described how Cooper’s “try-hard” person came out in his interviews — about how he spent six years studying conducting to perform as Bernstein, his “hilarious” revelation that he walks around naked in his home, or his cover photo for the New York Times magazine, showing himself submerged in a freezing creek.
“I just feel like the Bradley Coper media machine, for whatever reason, backfired on him and turned him into this villain of awards season,” Belloni said, “where people turned on the movie and decided that it was vanity play, that it was more about Bradley Cooper and his desire for an Oscar, than it was about about Leonard Bernstein and whatever he was after in the movie.”
As for the Times photo of Cooper floating in a freezing river in upstate New York, Belloni asked, “What was he thinking there?”
But if Cooper made a number of missteps in his campaign for “Maestro,” he could be said to be happy in love with Hadid, according to Page Six. A source close to Hadid told the outlet, “It’s definitely getting more serious, they are totally into each other.”
