In August 2023, Netflix launched the primary trailer for Leonard Bernstein’s biopic Maestro, a teaser that rapidly triggered a stir for revealing director and star Cooper’s option to put on a big prosthetic nostril for the position. The trailer sparked a wave of criticism on social media, with complaints that the prosthetic nostril performed into anti-Semitic stereotypes and that efforts ought to have been made to solid a Jewish actor who appeared extra like Bernstein as an alternative of taking part in Cooper to play in a prosthesis.
Extra like this:
– The true motive why Barbie was rejected from the Oscars
– Bradley Cooper’s biopic about Bernstein is successful
– 25 motion pictures to observe in 2024
Others – together with Bernstein’s personal youngsters – rapidly got here to Cooper’s protection, with many stating that the visible transformation, achieved utilizing a sequence of prosthetics designed by Oscar-winning particular make-up results artist Kazu Hiro, was one in every of was probably the most spectacular. notable points of the movie.
Now the movie has been nominated for an Academy Award for Greatest Make-up and Hair Styling (together with six different nominations, together with Greatest Image). That is Hiro’s fourth Oscar nomination and may very well be his third win: the famend make-up wizard has beforehand gained Academy Awards for his work remodeling Gary Oldman into Winston Churchill for Darkest Hour and John Lithgow into Roger Ailes for Bombshell . The BBC’s Nicholas Barber referred to as the work on Maestro “the very best old-age make-up” he had ever seen, and plenty of critics agreed. Though Cooper’s nostril was the primary focus of early web discourse, the movie’s make-up and prosthetic work prolonged a lot additional, with Hiro crafting a number of units of prosthetics for Cooper to play Bernstein at ages starting from 25 to 71, and never solely his nostril however his cheeks, chin, brow, ears, neck, shoulders and palms.
Jazz Tangcay, editor-in-chief of Selection, tells BBC Tradition that Kazu Hiro is “the individual to beat this yr” with regards to the Oscar for make-up and hairstyling: “The Academy loves transformation.” She spoke to Hiro in November concerning the unbelievable quantity of labor that went into recreating Bernstein’s face and physique at totally different ages, and says she was blown away by the very first picture she noticed of Maestro. “Everybody was like, ‘Wait, that is Bradley Cooper?’” she remembers. “You are instantly fascinated and you do not see Bradley Cooper, you see Leonard Bernstein, and he simply grew to become this individual from that first body.”
For Tangcay, it is each the completeness of Cooper’s transformation and the sheer measurement of the age vary Hiro recreates that makes the make-up behind Maestro so spectacular. “It is nearly as if Kazu ages Hiro Bradley Cooper with out the usage of VFX. And it is all executed in an unbelievable approach that by no means takes you out of the film.”
