Democracy is broken, they say. The wants of the electorate are contradictory and rooted in base emotions rather than rational thought. Viable alternatives are nonexistent, so we treat the ensuing insanity as a spectator sport, posting impotently as the world burns. I could be talking about electoral politics, but in this instance I am actually talking about Oscar campaigns.
We as individuals do not cast the ballots that determine the year’s best actor or finest cinematographer or most evocative sound design. That privilege falls to a shadowy elite, who decide these things based on their personal aesthetic judgments — but also, it turns out, based on larger narratives that all of us get to judge, narratives about who has achieved true stardom or whose moment has come. It’s a strange arrangement: The public has no official say, and yet our collective gut-check vibes appear to influence the result just the same. Hence the Oscar campaign, which aims not just to persuade academy voters that a given contender deserves their support, but also to create a good story around it — and, ideally, a culture-wide consensus that the nominee’s victory is nearly inevitable.
The 2025 race has been weirder than most. Three campaigns stand out — one weirdly funny, one weirdly disastrous and one weirdly endearing. The funny one involved the movie adaptation of the Broadway musical “Wicked.” An endless promotional push surrounded the film’s November release, and a clear bid for Oscar recognition followed, but the highlight of the whole thing was its strangest moment: a journalist solemnly informing the two lead actresses, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, that fans of the film were “holding space” for the lyrics of the breakout song “Defying Gravity.” Erivo was visibly moved by this news; Grande then reached out to hold Erivo’s pointer finger. Both women appeared to be on the verge of tears. The moment was so eerie and absurd that it was rehashed online for weeks. Maybe it helped: Each woman did ultimately secure an Oscar nomination.
The disaster involved “Emilia Pérez,” the polarizing Spanish-language French musical crime film about a transgender Mexican cartel leader. For a moment, this looked like the film to beat: It won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and garnered 13 Oscar nominations, including best picture, best director and best actress. But it was quickly subsumed by a series of controversies. There was criticism, from L.G.B.T.Q. advocates, that the film was “a step backward for trans representation”; there was negative coverage from the Mexican press about how the country was portrayed. Most devastating, there were unearthed social media posts by the film’s star, Karla Sofía Gascón, disparaging George Floyd and Islam, among other hot-button topics — most likely torpedoing the chances of the first openly transgender actor nominated for an Oscar.
Then there was the third offensive, the one credited with “making Oscar campaigning fun again.” Timothée Chalamet claimed a best-actor nomination, his second, for his lead role in the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” — a film he’s quite good in, especially when he evokes Dylan’s unique blend of mumbly insouciance and magnetic star power. His status as a favorite slipped after he lost out on early awards. But his campaign has been something else: not just fun, but a genuine masterpiece of self-promotion.
It has scored so many hits, across so many platforms, that it’s helpful to break them into categories. In October, when Chalamet showed up to a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest (and later posed with the winner at the Golden Globes), it made for the kind of charming general-interest story that would be shared widely on Facebook. When he appeared in a video with the internet personality Nardwuar and talked about how “I rip Milk Duds” at the movies: That one serviced a slightly different segment, the “extremely online.” Elsewhere he would give special attention to the niche demographic of “Bob Dylan nerds,” to which I personally belong. On Instagram, he posted a video of himself listening to the 1980s outtake “Blind Willie McTell.” Even more specific was a reference to Dylan’s bizarre, bewigged appearance at the 2003 Sundance premiere of his own Dylan movie, “Masked and Anonymous” — Chalamet copied that wardrobe at the New York premiere of “A Complete Unknown,” a gesture that only the most committed Dylanologists would fully appreciate.
You have to learn to be yourself, but on purpose.
There was also January’s appearance on “Saturday Night Live,” where Chalamet was both the host and, stunningly, the musical guest. He credibly performed three Dylan songs, none of them widely known. He was earnest and self-mocking, keenly aware of the ridiculousness of playacting as an iconic musician but committed to the tactic nonetheless. “I’m so grateful ‘Saturday Night Live’ is still doing weird stuff like this,” he said.
Oscar campaigns used to rely on staples like the “revealing” magazine profile or the pretentious “actors’ round table.” This is how narratives are hatched: the film that “saved” Hollywood, the beloved veteran who finally gets her due, the young star anointed as an industry pillar. In a different era, Chalamet might have behaved like Leonardo DiCaprio, a classically aloof and media-averse leading man who embraced the grit and prestige of Martin Scorsese films in order to prove he wasn’t just a pretty-boy movie star. Instead, Chalamet seems to understand that authenticity in the internet age is achieved through different means. To paraphrase Paul Newman in “The Color of Money,” you have to learn to be yourself, but on purpose.
This was most apparent during the Chalamet moments that fell into a fourth category: his appeals to the demographic of “dudes who don’t normally care about Timothée Chalamet.” In December, he popped up, improbably, as a guest picker on ESPN’s “College GameDay,” where he provided detailed breakdowns and predictions for the day’s slate of football games, some of them shockingly canny. (He was the only one to correctly call the Ohio Bobcats’ blowout victory in the MAC championship.) Most important, he looked surprisingly comfortable in this environment — just as he did, several days later, on the popular brosphere podcast “This Past Weekend.”
None of this has much to do with movie acting, but it has everything to do with authenticity. Watching Chalamet, I’ve thought often about Bradley Cooper, whose own Oscar campaign for 2023’s “Maestro” was considered a debacle. There are parallels between the two: Both were playing real musicians, both made it abundantly known how much actorly preparation went into their craft, both seemed eager to cast off “pretty boy” claims and prove themselves as dramatic heavyweights. But Cooper’s attempts to ingratiate himself with the public were oddly unsuccessful. His crime? He wanted it too badly, too transparently. He was seen, according to Vox, as an inauthentic “try-hard,” overly concerned with awards.
Aren’t most people in Hollywood guilty of that? It seems to me that Cooper’s real offense was not grasping the contradictory demands of a modern Oscar campaign: You must care but appear not to care. Your aim is to be taken seriously, but this sometimes must be pursued via unserious means. You put yourself out there, but only so that the voters can feel as though they discovered your greatness on their own.
Timothée Chalamet understands this. If he manages an Oscar win, it won’t just be for playing for Bob Dylan. It will also recognize his winning performance as a seemingly relatable, down-to-earth person — the most challenging role for any movie star to pull off.
Source photographs for illustration above: Phillip Faraone/Getty Images; Rosalind O’Connor/NBC, via Getty Images; Gerald Matzka/Getty Images.
Steven Hyden is the author of six books, including, most recently, “There Was Nothing You Could Do: Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Born in the U.S.A.’ and the End of the Heartland.” He is the cultural critic at UPROXX.
The post Timothée Chalamet Should Win an Oscar for His Oscar Campaign appeared first on New York Times.
