Sisterhood of the Useless Degrees

Anyone who really knows me knows what a huge Alias fan I once was. I have all five seasons on DVD. I will still watch bad Jennifer Garner movies on the strength of her work on Alias. And I mean really bad things. Like Elektra and Catch and Release.

My Alias love knew no bounds, which means anyone who appeared on that show during its run endeared themselves to me so much that I tracked (and supported) their career for years thereafter.

Said all that to say: Bradley Cooper used to be my homeboy.

As Will Tippin, the bespectacled reporter-friend of Sydney Bristow, Cooper was equal parts probing and patient and paranoid (and rightfully so, Sydney’s dad had to shoot him up with heroin in order to get him fired from his newspaper gig, after he snooped too much into their CIA double-agency and made SD-6′s assassination list…).

He was also in love with Jennifer Garner’s character and regularly said things to her like, “I don’t love you because of what you do or don’t do. I just love you.”

Bradley Cooper used to be awesome.

But then he left Alias and it was like one wrong move after another. (Mind you, I didn’t know his work before Alias. I hear he was great in Wet Hot American Summer or whatever, but that’s kind of beside my point here.)

Here are a few of the reasons Cooper’s racked up for induction into our infamous Tool Shed:

1. Leaving Alias in the first place–especially since he kind of did it on slightly pretentious terms. Let’s look at this IGN interview real quick:

“Cooper says that his departure from Alias was a mutual decision. “It was me, actually. It was a combination. We just decided that the character was going in a sort of corner and there was nowhere to go. So we [decided] the best thing to do was to not be on the show anymore and maybe come back and be able to do a lot in one episode as opposed to, you know, peppered throughout 22 episodes just fixing ketchup bottles and flipping pancakes with Francie. You know what I mean? And just saying, ‘Hey, how was your trip?’”

Um, here’s the thing, Brad. It wasn’t like you were a highly-sought-after, deeply well-respected thespian like, say, Chiwetel Ejiofor. Or Ryan Gosling. It wouldn’t have killed you to stay on a gig, collecting a steady check, being part of a convoluted and campy, yet deliciously entertaining spy family mythos, okay? You may as well have stayed and “flipped pancakes” if you were gonna be forced to take:

2. Kitchen Confidential as your next steady gig. This Fox dud about “a bad boy chef running wild in his NYC eatery” disappeared faster than Sydney Bristow after a completed mission.

3. Then, somewhere in there, you decided to take the role of Sack the uberjerky jock boyfriend of Rachel McAdams in The Wedding Crashers. You were starting to play tools, back to back. I sensed a pattern. Art imitating life, perhaps?

4. Somehow, you found time to meet, woo, and marry actress Jennifer Esposito all in the space of two years. Then you two divorced all in the space of four months. She filed.

5. I kind of stopped paying attention to you after that. But suffice it to say between She’s Just Not That Into You, where you play a husband cheating on Jennifer Connelly with Scarlett Johansson (of all people) and your unwarranted hosting of Tool’s Paradise: Late Night, also known as SNL, it’s really not lookin’ good for you, buddy.

6. Now we hear you might be dating Drew Barrymore which, if true, would make you the second costar she’s dating from that ridiculous-looking film, which seems to be set in a “Baltimore” where only three people are Black.

7. (Update!): Yesterday, we saw the trailer for your new film, where apparently you seem to be rejecting a pratfalling Sandra Bullock. Signing on for any film that requires the forty-something Bullock to behave the way she did when she was twentysomething, only *now* she has to cut her hair into an embarrassing blonde bob to do it, is a total tool move.

8. Did we mention Failure to Launch?

It is for these reasons and these alone that we warmly welcome you to the Tool Shed, my friend.