Bradley Cooper’s “Maestro” scored seven nominations at the 2024 Oscars including best makeup and hairstyling — despite receiving backlash over the actor’s prosthetic nose.
Cooper, 48, was first criticized for wearing a large, fake schnoz in the Leonard Bernstein biopic in May 2022 after photos from the set went viral online.
At the time, many social media users slammed Cooper, who was raised Catholic and is of Irish-Italian descent, for furthering a “damaging stereotype” by wearing the prosthetic.
“Who the f–k made the conscious decision to say ‘oh yes, we’ll put a prosthetic nose on a non-jewish man to play a jewish person, brilliant idea, definitely not anti-semitic or a damaging stereotype in any way,” one user wrote on X (formerly Twitter) in May 2022.
“Or you could…hire an old Jewish actor…instead of slapping on a prosthetic nose? this some antisemitic bulls–t that he’ll win an Oscar for,” another added.
The uproar was reignited a year later when the first teaser for the film — which is described as a “fearless love story” between the famed composer and his wife, Felicia Montealegre Cohn Bernstein (played by Carey Mulligan) — dropped in August.
At the time, Jewish actress Tracy-Ann Oberman told Pvnew: “If Bradley Cooper is able to play the Elephant Man without any prosthetics, he should be able to play a Jewish man without any need for prosthetics — especially a ‘Jewish’ nose.”
She continued, “If he needs to wear a prosthetic nose then that is, to me and many others, the equivalent of blackface or yellowface.”
However, Jewish “Leopoldstadt” actor Joshua Malina pushed back against the critiques, telling us that he did “not take issue with Bradley Cooper being made to look like a real person.”
“Jews do not, in fact, have bigger noses than other people do; Leonard Bernstein did,” he said. “That’s the end of the story for me.”
Bernstein was born to Russian Jewish immigrants in 1918 and famously composed “West Side Story.” The Netflix film spanned the earlier years of his life until his death in 1990.
Following the mixed reaction, Bernstein’s real-life children Jamie Alexander and Nina Bernstein penned a letter explaining that they “were touched” by the “depth” of Cooper’s “commitment” to playing their father.
“It breaks our hearts to see any misrepresentations of misunderstandings of his efforts,” they wrote. “It happens to be true that Leonard Bernstein had a nice, big nose. Bradley chose to use makeup to amplify his resemblance, and we’re perfectly fine with that.”
They also noted that their dad “would have been fine with it as well.”
Cooper — who starred in and directed the Steven Spielberg- and Martin Scorsese-produced film — also defended his decision during an interview with CBS’ Gayle King in November.
“The truth is … I’d done this whole process out of love, and it’s so clear to me where I come from,” he said.
While Cooper initially thought he wouldn’t “need” the prosthetic because his nose was already “very similar” to Bernstein’s, he later decided it was necessary to look more like the musical genius.
He noted that faces are “all about balance,” and while their noses were similar, his “lips” and “chin” are “nothing like Lenny’s,” so “it just didn’t look right” without the enhancement.
Cooper also explained that the film used minimal prosthetics when he played Bernstein in his younger years; however, they had to add more to reflect the aging process as the timeline advanced.
“By the time he’s older, it’s the whole face [that had prosthetics], so we just had to do it,” he said. “Otherwise, I wouldn’t believe he was a human being.”
Along with best makeup, “Maestro” is nominated for best actor, best actress, best picture, best original screenplay, best cinematography and best sound.
