Michael Cuby

Before this year’s Best Actor Oscars race whittled down to a face-off between Cillian Murphy as Oppenheimer’s tortured “Father of the Atomic Bomb” and Paul Giamatti as The Holdovers’ crotchety classics professor, there was a blip during the height of film festival season when the award felt like it could, at long last, be Bradley Cooper’s to lose. One of the Academy’s most infamous also-rans, Cooper has already lost four acting Oscars, with five more losses as a producer or writer. But as the le…