Oscar rebound: Why Lady Gaga is taking a new approach in 2020
This time last year she was everywhere, thanks to her Oscar-winning turn in A Star Is Born, so why is the pop diva in a more reflective mood in 2020?
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Her Vegas show is called Enigma — and that’s exactly what Lady Gaga is proving to be in 2020.
This time last year she was everywhere, queen of the screens and the charts, thanks to her incredible success in A Star Is Born with Bradley Cooper. She was nominated for best actress and won best song at last year’s Oscars and the movie’s album went to the top of the charts. We couldn’t get enough of her.
But fast-forward 12 months and Lady Gaga has started the new year in a more reflective mood.
Despite winning two Grammys at last weekend’s awards for her A Star Is Born music, the show-stopping singer was nowhere to be seen at the event, much to the disappointment of fans. She has been a Grammys red-carpet regular for the past five years and up until now has not been one to miss making an entrance. Who can forget her all-time greatest appearance at the Met Gala in May, with a 16-minute reveal on the stairs, where she stripped down to her underwear and wheeled her make-up cart. Maybe even she can’t follow that.
So what’s going on? The answer is Lady Gaga is starting the new decade the way she means to go on. Performing in Miami ahead of the SuperBowl this weekend, she also has a highly anticipated new single on its way.
With no new album since 2016’s Joanne, her Little Monsters can’t wait. A track titled Stupid Love went viral recently after it was supposedly leaked to her fans, and while Lady Gaga didn’t confirm it was hers, she tweeted “Can y’all stop”, which didn’t say it wasn’t, either.
The main thing is her fans loved it — calling it a return to form and “song of the year”.
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Having had a tumultuous year in 2019, with Oscar success, Vegas residency and the launch of her make-up line Haus Laboratories, things were going at break-neck speed for Stefani Germanotta, before taking a tumble late in the year, literally, when she fell off stage at Vegas, and split from her boyfriend Dan Horton, who she had been dating a few months after breaking off her engagement to Christian Carino last February.
Interestingly, Lady Gaga’s make-up line means we see more of the real star than ever, as she poses on social media wearing her new products, appearing relatively bare-faced for the singer.
When she launched her make-up palettes, she posted to her 80 million Twitter followers, “I assume many would expect my first palette to be full of crazy colours, but the truth is when I was first discovering my identity, self-love and compassion, I used colours that would contour, shape, and amplify my look in a way that made me feel beautiful.”
Perhaps indicative of her focus for the new year, in January she appeared as part of the Oprah stadium tour talking about mental health and her battle with fibromyalgia, which she said caused her “head-to-toe pain”.
“I’ve found through neuropsych research and my relationship with my doctors that fibromyalgia can be treated through mental health therapy,” she said. “And mental health … should be treated as a medical condition. It should not be ignored.”
Saying mental health is in crisis, she revealed she wants to work in the space to make sure the next generation has better access to help.
She also candidly revealed she had been raped at 19, after which she developed post-traumatic stress disorder, because she buried it away.
“I was travelling the world going from hotel room to garage to limo to stage, and I never dealt with it, and then all of a sudden I started to experience this incredible intense pain throughout my entire body that mimicked the illness I felt after I was raped,” she said.
So, with a more introspective approach, has the outgoing Lady Gaga been left behind in the last decade?
The singer, 33, says no. “We’re having a self-care conversation but I’m still going to make music, don’t worry,” she told Oprah.
And after receiving a rapturous response to her performance in A Star is Born, she is also planning on more acting. Her next role is in the upcoming Ridley Scott movie about the Gucci trials.
It was announced she will play Patrizia Reggiani, the socialite convicted of ordering the murder of ex-husband Maurizio Gucci in 1995. Promising high glamour and drama, she’s a perfect fit. After all, she was born this way.