Bradley Cooper’s musical drama A Star is Born, starring himself and Italian-American singer Lady Gaga, opened in New York City on October 5, 2018.
It’s not an Italian story, but Lady Gaga is Italian-American.
The film premiered at Venice on August 31, 2018. The movie has been popular and received broad critical acclaim. The American Film Institute named A Star is Born as one of the Top 10 films of 2018. However it has not lived up to its popular appeal in winning awards.
This is one of the great love stories. The connection between Cooper and Lady Gaga is fantastic. She made a fairly quick rise to fame out of downtown New York City, so the storyline is a natural fit. The music is great too.
A Legendary Story
This story is of an aspiring singer who meets an established, but aging star who is an alcoholic and drug abuser. They fall in love. He draws her out and brings him on tour with him where she wins increasing acclaim.
Getting noticed, she starts working with others and performing on her own. As her star rises, his begins to fall. He starts to embarrass her with drunken episodes. He proposes suddenly and they marry.
Her star keeps rising and she wins the industry’s major award. She keeps trying to get her man back on his feet, but he continues to stumble and interferes with her work.
She decides to help him get healthy by bringing him along on her tour, just as he had done when she started. He promises to come to her show that night, but while alone hangs himself.
The film is a remake of Frank Pierson’s 1976 film starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson, which is a remake of George Cukor’s 1954 film starring Judy Garland and James Mason, which itself is a remake of William Wellman’s 1937 film starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March.
The original story was about a rising actress and a declining actor. The 1976 movie starring Barbra Streisand made it about a singer.
The Endless Cycle of Birth and Death
If you are creative, you must see this film. You will see who you want to be, and you also will see who you don’t want to be. Many artists have been both.
That is the artist’s struggle, to walk the line between creativity and destruction. It’s like walking the edge of a razor without cutting yourself.
The connection between Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper is powerful. We all want to love like that – at least until we don’t. There is no twinkle in hitching your star to someone who can’t fly at all or who has flown too high.
When you look up in the night sky far from the city, you see a sky filled with stars. Some of the stars we see are themselves galaxies and many of them are actually star pairs. There are so many points of light in the sky that their number is beyond human comprehension. When we get small as an atom or big as a galaxy, things get very strange. I wonder if every living thing has its own star in the sky.
Somewhere every second in the universe, a star dies. But in the same moment another is born. Go see the movie because who knows, that new star in the sky just might be yours.
A Star is Born Awards
The film has earned many nominations, but the only major award it has won is a Golden Globe for Best Original Song in a Movie for Lady Gaga’s Shallow. It also won an American Film Institute award for Movie of the Year.
Oscar Nominations
- Best Picture
- Lead Actor (Bradley Cooper)
- Lead Actress (Lady Gaga)
- Supporting Actor (Sam Elliott)
- Adapted Screenplay (Eric Roth, Bradley Cooper, Will Fetters)
- Cinematography (Matthew Libatique)
- Sound Mixing
- Original Song (Shallow Lady Gaga, Mark Ronson, Anthony Rossomando, Andrew Wyatt and Benjamin Rice)