Where were you when you realized that you knew too much about Bradley Cooper? Was it when he revealed he spent six years studying conducting to perform as Leonard Bernstein in his auteurist Netflix original film Maestro? Or perhaps it was the time he cried in front of Bernstein’s surviving family. Maybe it was when he said his dad walked around naked his whole childhood? Or when you learned that he reportedly “hates” chairs, and banned them on his set because they suck the energy out of the people who sit in them?

The reason many of us know a lot about Cooper at this moment is that he’s in the home stretch of an Oscar campaign for Maestro, which he directed, co-wrote, and starred in. The film is up for seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Cooper. And an Oscar campaign means a lot of talking about the movie in the hope that what you say will sway voters to give said film awards. Cooper currently has zero Oscars, despite 12 total nominations, and the interviews he’s been giving indicate that he would very much like to change that goose egg.

What’s perhaps strange to some is that Bradley Cooper is a man who became famous for being cool and hot, and for starring in movies — Wet Hot American Summer, Wedding Crashers, The Hangover, Guardians of the Galaxy — that aren’t Oscar stuff.

When did the guy who voices a machine gun-toting space raccoon start caring about the interior life of Leonard Bernstein? When exactly did the bro in Wedding Crashers become a method actor? Why is a guy who is so good at being likable in some movies so unbelievably bad at being likable in real life?

The thing is: It’s the other way around. This extremely serious, try-hard man who hates chairs and loves Leonard Bernstein is who Bradley Cooper has always been — whether we like him or not.

What if Bradley Cooper has always been a try-hard?

Cooper has been in the conversation for acting Oscars since 2012’s Silver Linings Playbook. Cooper wasn’t going to beat Daniel Day-Lewis’s turn as Abraham Lincoln at that year’s ceremony, but he was largely seen as a talented underdog who showed more versatility than his previous roles. Looking back, Cooper probably should have received more awards for his 2018 directorial debut, A Star is Born. He could have taken home the Best Actor award that year — Rami Malek’s win for Bohemian Rhapsody seems more clownish by the day — and even if the film was not Best Picture, it’s clear no film should have lost to Green Book.

But it was during that latter Oscar run that something shifted.

In September 2018, during the Oscar campaign for A Star is Born, the New York Times published a story on Cooper entitled “Bradley Cooper Is Not Really Into This Profile.” Journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner detailed at length how reluctant Cooper was to give her personal details about the extremely powerful film he created, to the point where Cooper........

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