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“I used to walk down the street like I was a fucking star,”  Lady Gaga  told  Rolling Stone  for  her first cover story  in 2009. She was talking about her state of mind before her big breakthrough the year prior, but by the time she spoke to  RS , Gaga didn’t need to pretend. She had become a bona fide megastar and an heir to the pop throne, just like the Madonnas, Janets, and Britneys before her. And it was all thanks to the self-fulfilling prophecy of her debut album, boldly titled  The Fame . Prior to  The Fame , Gaga was languishing in New York’s Lower East Side as just another hopeful. The Manhattan-born Stefani Germanotta dropped out of NYU, where she studied music and would perform piano ballads at the legendary, nearby Bitter End. She embedded herself in the club scene, launching Lady Gaga and the Starlight Revue with Lady Starlight. The pair’s pop-burlesque show paid tribute to the Seventies and helped to mold Gaga’s onstage persona, the same one the world would meet in

The “A Star Is Born” soundtrack is a star in its own right. Sources watching retail reports come in from the album’s first five days of sales say it’s expected to debut with more than 200,000 copies sold in its first week, not accounting for streaming or other forms of consumption. Official figures won’t be announced till Sunday. But if those numbers hold up, it would be the biggest week in pure album sales for the soundtrack to a movie musical since “Frozen” in 2014. A figure over 200,000 would also give “A Star Is Born” easily the best opening tally for any soundtrack in 2018, surpassing another Interscope release that currently holds that title, “Black Panther: The Album.” The album’s success is vindicating the strategy to withhold all of the music — with the exception of a single, “Shallow” — until the day of the movie’s release last Friday. That plan may have come about primarily from a desire to keep the songs as surprises for moviegoers as the tunes pop up in key emotional

It is far easier to forgive a film for a weak first half than a weak second half. The films I’ve been seeing at Venice this week almost all pass the two-hour mark — a lot of big, long movies that beg a joke about the nearly all-male competition lineup that I am just going to let you make for yourself. But it should be noted that some have had an easier time sustaining themselves through that run time than others. Two of the most anticipated titles of the festival had their premieres on Friday, and you could feel the security tighten on the Lido in preparation for Lady Gaga’s plumage to land on the red carpet (it was not a victimless frenzy). The first half of A Star Is Born, Bradley Cooper’s remake of Hollywood’s favorite story it tells itself, are among the most exhilarating of any film you’ll see this year; unabashedly wish-fulfillment porn but through an electrically intimate, contemporary lens. Lady Gaga, famously made-under in her feature film debut, is Ally, a food service emp