Why Timothee Chalamet Will or Won’t Win the Oscar for ‘Marty Supreme’

For his most visible Q&A during final Oscar voting, live on stage before an audience including Academy members, Timothée Chalamet sat for a taping of the basketball-focused podcast Mind the Game, hosted by NBA legends LeBron James and Steve Nash. For virtually any other nominee this year, the choice would seem out of character, inevitably distracting, ultimately baffling. For the Marty Supreme star, it was a natural culmination of another singular awards run. Chalamet does things his own way.

The merits of his approach have drawn scrutiny for going on two years now, since he’s contending for the best actor Oscar for the second straight season. (Last year, he was up for A Complete Unknown and lost to The Brutalist’s Adrien Brody.) He has kept things interesting. On the campaign trail, Chalamet has crashed his own lookalike contests and appeared in music videos to dispel — or inflame? — rumors of a rapper alter ego, EsDeeKid. He’s mostly eschewed typical awards press while giving lengthy interviews to the likes of Theo Von and Cody Rhodes. He’s played basketball with Adam Sandler and Los Angeles high schoolers; he’s hosted a town hall with Matthew McConaughey for Austin college students. He’s inundated us with real blimps and fake Zoom meetings and floods of orange.

As far as celebrity marketing goes, Chalamet demonstrates ingenuity. Along with his talent as an actor, his innovative, often meta promotional strategies have helped make him arguably the most bankable movie star of his generation — proving a range of risky films, whether original or IP-driven, can still make noise in theaters. The high-wire Marty Supreme has made more than $173 million worldwide and counting, becoming A24’s highest-grossing movie ever both domestically and globally. The Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown fared nearly as well. And all that’s to say nothing of Dune or Wonka, expensive IP remixes that scored both with critics and at the box office. At a recent retrospective for the Gen Z star put on by the American Cinematheque, icons like Denis Villeneuve, Edward Norton and Christopher Nolan showed up in support. 

This is partly why, even at just 30 years old, Chalamet entered this Oscar season with a persuasive narrative to go all the way. His contributions have been undeniably enormous at a time when existential anxieties about the business’ future mount by the day. Add in the strong reception to Marty Supreme and his electric performance — sterling reviews, a slew of critics’ prizes and nine Oscar noms including for best picture, director, screenplay and, of course, actor — and a frontrunner was born. His winning both the Golden Globe and the Critics’ Choice Award did not change matters.

Then the industry weighed in. Neither the BAFTAs nor the Actor Awards — whose memberships overlap some with the Academy — gave Chalamet their best actor prize, despite each group embracing Marty with a ton of nominations. The last Oscar winner in the category to lose with both BAFTA and SAG-AFTRA was Mystic River’s Sean Penn, more than 20 years ago. 

So while this very chaotic race remains within Chalamet’s grasp — BAFTA honored I Swear’s Robert Aramayo, who wasn’t even eligible for this cycle’s Oscars — the odds are no longer in his favor. (Oscar voting closes Thursday at 5 p.m. PT.) 

Is this because Chalamet so relentlessly plays by his own campaign rules? Perhaps. Voters can be stuffy about how they like to see a candidate work a room; I’ve heard a few saying as much recently, and the sentiment was widespread last year, when Chalamet came close (he won that Actor Award — and gave an infamously, erm, aspirational speech). While Chalamet has hit more of the typical spots than his last go-round, my colleague Scott Feinberg reported on Sunday that Chalamet’s “swagger” has put some off. The “annoying” label gets bandied around. Old rules still apply: No amount of fluffy A-lister conversations and viral media stunts can compensate for a few hours of gladhanding and boilerplate craft talk. 

Whether they should is another matter. For a fresh generation of moviegoers, Chalamet’s tactics are exciting — even motivating when it comes to actually buying a movie ticket. Both A Complete Unknown and Marty Supreme hit theaters around Christmas, just as Oscar season fully kicks into gear and thus blurring the lines of release and awards promotion. Chalamet’s work behind the scenes preceded any opening; he’s also Oscar-nominated this year for best picture as a producer. And I’m told Chalamet is still traveling the world to open Marty, now in markets like Tokyo and Beijing. The movie is hitting more than 800 screens this weekend. You can bet it’ll be finding some new film fans.

This is a good thing, obviously, but the Academy has a longstanding hangup with young movie stars leaning into their fame and cache. In the Oscars’ 97-year history, more than 30 women have won the best actress trophy before turning 30. Meanwhile, only one man has ever done it — a pre-Brutalist Adrien Brody, winning for The Pianist at 29. Major stars like Leonardo DiCaprio and Will Smith won in their 40s and 50s after decades of noms. Should Chalamet pull it out on March 15, he’ll be the category’s second-youngest winner ever. 

It’s telling, too, that while a genuine wild card remains in The Secret Agent’s Wagner Moura — he won a Globe alongside Chalamet, and wasn’t nominated by BAFTA or SAG-AFTRA — Sinners’ Michael B. Jordan has emerged as Chalamet’s primary competition after winning the Actor Award. 

To an extent, they run in parallel: Jordan is similarly representing an original box-office success story and previously toplined his own hit franchise relaunch with Creed. But he’s also about 10 years older than Chalamet, traveled the circuit in far more traditional fashion and hadn’t even been nominated for an Oscar up to this point. For the Academy, that’s a relatively familiar, appealing package.

Chalamet represents a less comfortable path for the industry — an anointing of the popular kid, an endorsement of a set of campaign standards that doesn’t exactly align with its own. That’s a fascinating tension for this particular moment: Chalamet has proven the worth of his brazen, defiant style just as Hollywood is looking for any savior it can find. This leaves the ball, as it were, in the Academy’s court.