Originally published at: Bradley Cooper has a large prosthetic shnozz in his Leonard Bernstein biopic. People are upset. | Boing Boing
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Too much like right to just cast an actor that actually looked something like Bernstein, I guess. Far easier to lean into casual antisemitism.
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People! People! It’s ironic of course!
Just like the blackface in Tropic Thunder.
I shouldn’t have to put the /s here, but… /s
I think Tropic Thunder was damn hilarious (best Tom Cruise roll ever). Inappropriate? Hell yes.
I had to google images of Leonard Bernstein. Weird choice to put a fake honker on him (and mb some chin bits too?)
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Wilhelm Fliess has entered the chat.
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Man, I could have nailed that part!
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For comparison:
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If his kids and family are okay with it, and said Bernstein himself would have been okay with it, then I’m not really qualified to judge on their behalfs.
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And the Oscar for makeup effects during a historic WGA and SAG strike goes to…
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So many bad choices made by the studio here that i don’t know where to even start
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So many bad takes as well…
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Yeah, I saw this pic. I don’t know why they felt the need for a prosthetic. His nose doesn’t even look big, IMO, especially in proportion to his face… I think my nose more or less looks like that. And then Bradly Cooper’s nose has much more of a point to it, so they didn’t even get that right.
But really, is the size of his nose important? Was this something that was called attention to in his life? If not, then what does it really matter? It seems completely superfluous.
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Or more to the point – and this is a known problem in Hollywood – if you’re going to make a film about a Jewish guy, it would be best to cast a Jewish guy to play him.
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I was waiting for that reference, and was not disappointed.
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This is my take too. A prosthetic nose is potentially antisemitic, but it’s not unambiguously antisemitic like blackface is unambiguously racist. Yes, there is a long antisemitic history of exaggerated noses in media, but there’s also the fact that no actor looks exactly like the real person they’re cast to play and we use make-up and props to close the gap.
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Agree. A big, dumb, needless distraction. I couldn’t avoid focusing on how his voice might be effected by the prosthetic!
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The size of the prosthetic nose (which verges on Cyrano territory) seems to change even within the trailer. Did Bernstein get a nose job at some point in his life?
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Context was very different too.
Robert Downey Jr. wasn’t playing a Black man in that movie. RDJ was playing an idiot actor who was so blind to privilege that he didn’t understand why it was incredibly offensive to don prosthetic makeup in order to play a person of a different racial/ethnic background.
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