Last year's Oscar day Twitter chatter was overrun with jokes like this one - 'woke up this morning to hear that Leonardo DiCaprio and I still have the same number of Oscars, none.' This year, it might well be Bradley Cooper in the insert-name-here quips. (Also read - I Ate 6,000 Calories Daily to Prep for American Sniper: Bradley Cooper)
This is the third year in a row that Bradley has scored an Oscar nomination - Best Actor for American Sniper in 2015, Best Supporting Actor for American Hustle in 2014 and Best Actor for Silver Linings Playbookin 2013. By any definition, this is outstanding and astounding. But it also means that Bradley might make a hat-trick of going home Oscar-less.
In 2013, Daniel Day-Lewis took the prize for playing Abraham Lincoln and Jared Leto won Best Supporting Actor last year for his performance as a transgendered woman fighting AIDS in Dallas Buyers Club. This year, all signs point to Eddie Redmayne, who's won all the awards so far this season and will probably score again for playing Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. If he doesn't, Michael Keaton's manic Riggan Thomas in Birdman will.
Bradley Cooper, then, will become the latest celebrity addition to the twilight zone peopled by actors whose greatness is acknowledged and celebrated by everybody except the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He will be in the gladdest company - the late, great Peter O'Toole who was nominated eight times and then finally handed an honorary award, and Leonardo who scored his fourth Oscar nomination last year with The Wolf Of Wall Street.
This relegating of Bradley to the inheritance of loss is hideously unfair because he's turned in quite remarkable performances each year and it's hardly his fault that none of them happen to have him either battling a fatal disease or amending the American Constitution.
You'd think that playing the most decorated sniper in American war history would guarantee an Oscar on your shelf but, unluckily for Bradley, the competition consists of relentless physical suffering in the form of Mr Redmayne's Hawking and unmitigated emotional suffering in that of Mr Keaton's Riggan. The traumas of the war in Iraq may simply not be enough to turn the Academy's head.
