2019 Arthur Miller Foundation Honors© GettyImages

Bradley Cooper calls The Oscars and other awards shows ‘Utterly Meaningless’

The award-winning actor admits the whole thing messes with your head


SEPTEMBER 7, 2020 5:32 PM EDT

Even though he’s been nominated for and won his fair share of awards in the past,  Bradley Cooper  is letting the world know that The Oscars, and every other awards show, don’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.

During a recent interview with Hamilton star Anthony Ramos--who starred alongside Cooper in his runaway hit A Star is Born--the actor discussed what it‘s like to be part of the movie industry during awards season.

“That awards season stuff is a real test,” Cooper told Interview Magazine. ”It‘s set up to foster that mentality. It’s quite a thing to work through, and it’s completely devoid of artistic creation.

“It‘s not why you sacrifice everything to create art, and yet you spend so much time being a part of it if you’re, in quotes, ’lucky enough to be a part of it.’”

He went on to say, “It‘s ultimately a great thing because it really does make you face ego, vanity, and insecurity. It’s very interesting and utterly meaningless.”

While the actor calls these displays “meaningless,” that certainly doesn’t mean he still doesn’t get sucked into the vanity of it all. While Cooper has been nominated for eight Oscars and six Golden Globes so far in his career, he hasn’t yet won an award at either ceremony.

After putting his all into A Star Is Born, the star admitted that he felt “embarrassed” after not being nominated for Best Director.

“I was at a coffee shop in New York City and looked down at my phone and Nicole [Caruso, his publicist] has told me congratulations and said what we had been nominated for. They didn‘t even give me the bad news,” he said during an appearance on Oprah’s SuperSoul Conversations from Times Square. He went on to say, “I was embarrassed because I felt I hadn‘t done my job.”

In the same interview, Bradley talked about not leaving his house at all during quarantine.

“I’m with my daughter and my mother and my two dogs, and we have not left the house,” he told Interview Magazine. “My mother is going to be 80, and she has a colostomy bag, so I can’t let anybody in the house. And I can’t leave the house, because if she gets [coronavirus], it’s over.“

“We live in a little townhouse, thankfully there’s a backyard,” the actor added. “My family is very close, and my dad dying was brutal for all of us. It was a schism, and its aftershock has not stopped. And we need each other. So here we are … it‘s not like I live in a compound and she’s in the guesthouse. No, she’s in the next room.”

“But here‘s the thing,” he continued, “She’s a cool chick. We can hang, and she can roll with the punches.”