A Star Is Born’s mix of timeliness and timelessness could win it Best Picture

Earning admirable box office numbers and critical raves, A Star Is Born captured the zeitgeist in 2018. Here’s why it could win the Oscar for Best Picture.

The label “Best Picture” invites multiple interpretations. Is it a purely subjective measure of artistic merit? A marker of technical innovation or social significance? Does it predict longevity, anointing future classics? Or is it subject to the whims of contemporary trends and tastes?

I’ve come to think of the Oscars as a snapshot, offering a glimpse, however hazy, at the cultural climate of a given year. Moonlight’s victory, for example, reads as Hollywood’s response to the 2016 presidential election, a statement of empathy in the face of bigotry, while The Shape of Water’s victory a year later reads as a reaction to the ensuing presidency, indicating a craving for the comfort and moral simplicity of a fairytale. An ideal Best Picture winner, like Moonlight, manages to fuse timeliness with timelessness.

That is why we can easily see A Star Is Born taking home the win for Best Picture this year.

(L-R) BRADLEY COOPER as Jack and LADY GAGA as Ally in the drama “A STAR IS BORN,” from Warner Bros. Pictures, in association with Live Nation Productions and Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo: Neal Preston/Warner Bros.

At first glance, Bradley Cooper’s directorial debut seems as far removed from the real world as Wakanda. The fifth iteration of a story that dates back to the Great Depression, it’s an unabashed melodrama, reveling in heightened sentiment and dreamy, color-coded imagery. Surrounded by epics, satires, and parables, it sticks out like an off-key note, which might explain its tumble from awards season frontrunner to disappointment. Even fellow musical Bohemian Rhapsody has the veneer of an agenda, turning bisexual Queen frontman Freddie Mercury into an awkward hybrid of a martyr and a cautionary tale.

Look again, though, and a more complicated picture emerges. Beneath the delirious romance and catchy tunes, after all, this is a tragedy, culminating in a suicide that’s liable to send unsuspecting audience members into a Patrick Soltano-like rage.

To a greater extent than its predecessors, the latest A Star Is Born exposes the seams between its entwined narratives — the rise and the fall, the crowd-pleaser and the tearjerker — so that watching it feels a bit like listening to a duet comprised of melodies that don’t quite coalesce into a harmony. No other Best Picture nominee conveys so clearly or intuitively the feeling of being alive at this moment in history.

If 2016 was fueled by anger and 2017 by despair, then the mood of 2018 can best be described as tense. One had the sense of forever approaching a turning point — or breaking point — only for it to recede like a mirage, of being caught in a tug-of-war between irreconcilable forces.

2018 was a year of fallout (and Fallout), when America and Hollywood couldn’t decide whether to pick up the pieces of their messes or sweep them under the rug. This tension saturates A Star Is Born, lending its themes — the nature of celebrity, the pull of tradition, the blurred line between passion and addiction — synchronistic urgency.

(L-R) LADY GAGA as Ally and BRADLEY COOPER as Jack in the drama “A STAR IS BORN,” from Warner Bros. Pictures, in association with Live Nation Productions and Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo: Clay Enos/Warner Bros.

While certainly antiquated, the rock/pop dichotomy that the film constructs between its hero and heroine provides a convenient shorthand for their dynamic. Both characters are driven by a longing for something real, something more, but neither is sure what exactly that thing is. The scraps they find — in music, in love — prove ephemeral, corrupted by society, life, or their own imperfect selves, so, they keep searching, grasping for that elusive rush.

Ultimately, what dooms them is timing. Ally (Lady Gaga) is introduced as an ordinary waitress, breaking up with her boyfriend over the phone in a public restroom. Wearing plain clothes and minimal makeup, she embodies the casual, stripped-down aesthetic that, according to “rockism,” signals authenticity. Once she catapults to fame, she dyes her hair a garish shade of orange and starts trafficking in autotuned pop earworms, prompting Cooper’s Jackson Maine to chastise her for betraying her true self.

LADY GAGA as Ally and BRADLEY COOPER as Jack in the drama “A STAR IS BORN,” from Warner Bros. Pictures, in association with Live Nation Productions and Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Neal Preston

Yet, the ordinary waitress isn’t the true Ally either. Shortly after the phone call, she walks out of the restaurant and twirls in an alley with her arms outstretched, singing “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.” At night, she moonlights at a local drag bar, and Jackson first encounters her belting a cover of Edith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose” under disco lights, sporting a sleek black dress and false eyebrows. Performing for Ally doesn’t involve putting on a mask but taking one off, giving her a platform on which to display a different dimension of herself. She was always adept at adapting.

Jackson, meanwhile, is riding the coattails of his career, simultaneously dependent on and weary of the limelight. His look complements his country-rock sound: rugged and unkempt, evoking the wanderers of a mythic, bygone West. This, it turns out, is as much artifice as Ally’s gyrating, flame-haired diva; what comes across on stage as devil-may-care intensity morphs off-stage into reckless self-destruction. Unlike his protégé, Jackson resists change, unable to shake off the persona that has defined him for so long, even as it twists and ruins him. (“Maybe It’s Time” is a declaration of defiance, not acceptance.) Subconsciously, his collaboration with Ally serves the same purpose as alcohol: it’s a distraction, whiling away the hours until the inevitable.

(L-R) LADY GAGA as Ally and BRADLEY COOPER as Jack in the drama “A STAR IS BORN,” from Warner Bros. Pictures, in association with Live Nation Productions and Metro Goldwyn Mayer Pictures, a Warner Bros. Pictures release. Photo Credit: Neal Preston

Copyright: © 2018 WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC. AND METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER PICTURES INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

Disrupted by its hero’s untimely demise, A Star Is Born never resolves its various tensions. Even as she gets her triumphant ending, Ally is haunted by the specter of Jackson, her empowerment arc undercut by the toxic relationship that enabled it. She can’t entirely escape the orbit of men or the confines of the past. The concept of authenticity remains tantalizingly vague. Ally may be a full-fledged star when she locks eyes with the camera in the final shot, but as a person, she seems somehow lacking. Maybe it’s that very ambiguity — the fact that she can’t be pinned down — that makes her, at last, real. Hence the “Shallow” wail: it’s meaning without definition, an expression that transcends language.

A sense of limbo seeps into the craftsmanship too. On paper, this is an old-school spectacle, driven by the glamour and charisma of its leads, yet the filmmaking, heavy on visceral close-ups and jagged edits, grounds it firmly in the present. The result is a movie that is audacious, unruly, and, on a granular level, alive: every warmly lit frame pulsates with the devotion of people who sincerely believe in the power of art to devastate and uplift, to wound and heal.

Watching A Star Is Born, you feel more alive — and more keenly aware of how fragile and perilous that feeling is. It is a void and the thing that fills it.

The 91st Academy Awards air Sunday, Feb. 24, at 8:00 p.m. ET on ABC.