When you’re an actor in a movie that’s a massive hit, you’re the toast of the town. When you’re an actor in a movie that bombs, you’re…not. Lady Gaga has been on both sides of the equation. She’s an Academy Award-nominated actress, but that was yesterday. Today, she’s the co-star of Joker: Folie à Deux, one of the biggest bombs of last year. Having said that, she’s taking the movie’s failure in stride and taking a view of it that most others in Hollywood could probably learn from.
2019’s Joker was a massive hit by any definition, it was a huge box office success and it was a serious Oscar contender, earning multiple Oscar wins including a Best Actor award for Joaquin Phoenix. It’s no surprise that a sequel was given the green light. Unfortunately, the sequel failed to live up to expectations. It flopped with both audiences and critics. While that was almost certainly a disappointment for Lady Gaga, she tells Elle that sometimes, that’s just what happens…
People just sometimes don't like some things. It’s that simple. And I think to be an artist, you have to be willing for people to sometimes not like it. And you keep going even if something didn’t connect in the way that you intended. When that makes its way into your life, that can be hard to get control of. It’s part of the mayhem.
When a movie flops it’s pretty common to see fingers start to get pointed. Critics get blamed for bad reviews hurting the box office. Studios get blamed for not spending enough to market the movie to the right audience. Anybody on the cast or crew may take the hit for dropping the ball, resulting in a movie that could have been a success if only something had happened slightly differently. Sometimes an actor or director may fall on their sword and blame themselves.
But Lady Gaga isn’t blaming anybody. She’s pointing out (quite correctly) that movies are art and not all art works for everybody. Sometimes a work of art can connect with a large audience, sometimes it connects with a small audience, and sometimes art just gets rejected by everybody. Or at least everybody except Quentin Tarantino. That doesn’t mean the art is in some way wrong, it just is what it is.
Certainly, the movie business is a business, it’s not just about creating art for art’s sake. For that reason it’s understandable that we judge movies by box office receipts or by award nominations, tangible things that studios can point to, to show that investment in a film was worthy. But there is still an intangible element to art that can’t be forgotten.
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