So the news came through that Bradley Cooper had split with his partner Irina Shayk, co-parent of their daughter. And obviously this was big, big entertainment news and pretty much everyone who’d seen A Star Is Born went “Oh, I wonder if…”
But don’t! Because the very idea – THE VERY IDEA! – that people might have watched the on-screen chemistry between Cooper and Lady Gaga and wondered if it was real is actually THE END OF ALL HUMAN ETHICS.
As US journalist Mike Asti bravely said…
The fact that there were so many people actually rooting on Bradley Cooper to have an affair with Lady Gaga truly shows just how messed up our priorities as a society are.
— Mike J. Asti (@MikeAsti11) June 7, 2019
This was just one of the slew of tweets in a similar vein, and it really shouldn’t be worth saying but: no. No, it doesn’t show just how messed up our priorities as a society are.
In fact, I’ll go further:
I’ll wager that even if people were shipping Coops and Gags they were doing so out of a spirit of “I wish the pretty people fell in love like they did in that movie I like.”
And that is a rather more understandable response to watching a big screen romance and thinking “MMMM I SURE HOPE THOSE ATTRACTIVE ACTORS ARE ENJOYING MONOGAMY IN THEIR COMMITTED PRIVATE LIVES WITH THEIR SIGNIFICANT OTHERS OH YEAH THAT’S SOME HOT, HOT PRIORITY”.
“oh, man, those two are so hot: I sure hope that in real life these actors found this scene uncomfortable and disgusting as they yearn only for the touch of their partner.”
The entire point of putting attractive people in romantic situations in films is to make viewers believe they’re feeling it. Unless, of course, you’re making the Star Wars prequels.
Absolutely nobody who watched those films wondered whether Natalie Portman and Hayden Christensen had discovered a sizzling sexual chemistry offscreen, certainly.
“Ah, cool. Cool. Sorry, and you are…?”
And full disclosure: when I started this piece I honestly didn’t care about what happened to a bunch of people I don’t know, much less the ones that were in a film of which I’ve seen about 40 minutes.
But now I just want BraGa to happen, purely to annoy the internet scolds and their priorities.