Debate Intensifies Over the Merits of Timothée Chalamet’s Oscar Loss

The problem with analysing how the actor Timothée Chalamet ended up not winning the Oscar for best actor in “Marty Supreme” at the Academy Awards last Sunday, as had been widely anticipated, is that nobody is able to precisely identify what the problem was.Despite long being the favorite to win the Academy Award, Mr. Chalamet lost to Michael B. Jordan who played identical twin brothers in the vampire horror film “Sinners.” The subsequent inquest into why Mr. Chalamet is not an Oscar-winner has been going on since last Sunday’s ceremony and shows no sign of abating, with countless think pieces in the media and online discourse debating the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ verdict.Did Mr. Chalamet lose because the character he played, overzealous Jewish hustler and table tennis prodigy, Marty Mauser, was too unlikeable? Or was it because the actor himself was too unlikeable in his behavior during award season, wearing orange suits at both the East Coast and West Coast premieres of “Marty Supreme,” shooting his mouth off about a range of subjects, and brazenly flaunting his relationship with his socialite businesswoman girlfriend Kylie Jenner in decidedly tabloid-esque manner?Or was it simply that at the age of 30, Mr. Chalamet was too young for Academy voters and, despite the actor having landed three Oscar nominations prior to “Marty Supreme,” a recent career retrospective held at the American Cinematheque in Los Angeles to commemorate his films rubbed voters up the wrong way, given his relative youth?Whatever the reason, many people, including this writer, still believe Mr. Chalamet was hard done by in view of such an electrifying performance. The Sun’s critic A.R. Hoffman, in his review of “Marty Supreme” wrote the film had “the propulsive energy of a well struck ping pong ball whizzing through the air with millimeters to spare over the net.” Furthermore, the film was a huge box office hit, grossing over $95 million, the most commercially successful picture made by the independent upstart studio A24. Yet “Marty Supreme,” which also starred Gwyneth Paltrow and Odessa A’zion, won none of its nine Oscar nominations at the Oscars and Mr. Chalamet’s awards snub in part can be attributed to the film not being sufficiently admired by Academy voters (matters weren’t helped by a controversy first reported in the California Post over the film’s director Josh Safdie, creatively splitting from his brother Benny Safdie, over an underage actress allegedly being sexually exploited on the set of their 2017 film “Good Times.”)A film awards marketing consultant who worked on Oscars campaigns this year, but not on “Marty Supreme,” and speaking anonymously, said while they believed that Mr. Chalamet gave by far the best performance of all the nominated best actors in constructing a rich and complex character such as Marty Mauser, ultimately he himself was the architect of his own downfall.“It was Timothée Chalamet who was the driving force behind the idea to have such an unconventional and high-octane campaign for “Marty Supreme,” befitting the unconventional, high-octane character he played in the film”, the consultant said. “He [Mr. Chalamet] directed a fake Zoom video with him advising the marketing team on how a narcissistic movie star should act during Oscar season. It was his idea to wear an orange suit for the ‘Marty Supreme’ Los Angeles premiere and for his girlfriend to wear a matching orange cutout dress.” Timothée Chalamet and his girlfriend Kylie Jenner at the Los Angeles premiere of ‘Marty Supreme.’ Monica Schipper/Getty ImagesSuch eccentric imagery adopted by Mr. Chalamet was accompanied by some indiscreet statements he made in public, most notably his disclosure last month, in a CNN & Variety interview with the actor Matthew McConaughey, that “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera where it’s like, ‘Hey! Keep this thing alive,’ even though no one cares about this anymore. All respect to the ballet and opera people out there.” The backlash to the comments from opera houses and ballet theaters was pronounced, with even Oscars host Conan O’Brien and Steven Spielberg weighing in with jokes at Mr. Chalamet’s expense. Although voting for the Oscars had closed by the time Mr. Chalamet’s comments on ballet and opera went viral, to some the ensuing kerfuffle epitomized the backlash against his nomination.“Ironically, that CNN event was envisaged by A24 as a more ‘normal’ Oscars campaign opportunity, a counterweight to all the offbeat promotion that “Marty Supreme” had been doing previously and whose freshness was wearing thin,” the film consultant added. “Instead it reinforced the negative sentiment against him. It seemed symbolic that Misty Copeland, a ballet star, performed in a musical number with the “Sinners” ensemble at the Oscars, having previously posed in “Marty Supreme” merchandise to promote that movie last November. Her Oscars performance would have been arranged way in advance of the ballet story going viral, but it illustrated how much the tide had turned against Timothée Chalamet.”Mr. Chalamet has acknowledged his unusual marketing drive for “Marty Supreme.” His promotional exploits, he told IndieWire, last December, were “in the spirit of Marty, and I feel like this is ultimately an original film at a time when original movies aren’t really put out. It’s a movie about the pursuit of a dream. I’m leaving it on the field. Whether it’s the merch or the Zoom or the media appearances, I’m trying to get this out in the biggest way possible.”‘Marty Supreme.’ Via A24But longtime Oscar observers feel Mr. Chalamet ended up sabotaging his own game. The editor of the website Showbiz 411, veteran entertainment journalist Roger Friedman, told the Sun, “He does give a better performance [than Michael Jordan] but he screwed it up. Being dressed in orange all the time, having all the crazy stuff going on, like the ping pong balls and the girlfriend with him falling out of her dress — it was just a recipe for disaster. They [Oscar voters] were offended by him because he carried on like a lunatic.” Mr. Friedman added that going forward, Mr. Chalamet was “going to have change his behavior.”Others have pointed out that the Oscars have a longstanding tradition of honoring films for featuring unlikeable characters and it sets a worrying precedent that “Marty Supreme” should leave the ceremony empty-handed, in part on the rationale that its protagonist is deeply flawed. Given ratings for the Oscars dropped 9% year-on-year, to 17.86 million viewers across ABC and Hulu, perhaps the Oscars itself has more of a likability issue than Mr. Chalamet. Republican Texas senator, Ted Cruz, queried on X, in a post viewed over 750,00 times, whether previous best picture Oscar winners “The Godfather,” “Amadeus,” or “Titanic” would today have qualifed for Academy Award contention following the recent introduction of diversity, equity and inclusion criteria .“The viciousness was ridiculous,” the film writer who runs the website Hollywood Elsewhere, Jeffrey Wells, told the Sun of the reaction to Mr. Chalamet’s red carpet antics. “It was easily the best performance of the year. He captured a guy with special energy who was not neccessarily moralistic or ethical, but instead was a truly fascinating character. He decided not play his cards in a subdued, humble way, and just let it fly,” Mr. Wells added. “I guess people don’t like that and they don’t like career retrospectives for a guy who’s only thirty years old.”Yet Mr. Wells added he did not find Mr. Chalamet’s clothing appealing: “I love almost everything about him but I can’t stand his wardrobe. He’s been wearing the worst looking clothes, awful shirts and tuxedos. It’s not that he lacks for taste but he seemed to be doing that deliberately to provoke.” But he said Mr. Chalamet would learn from this experience: “It’s just a chapter he’s going through, he’s not an idiot. He’s going to adjust his game.”The film awards consultant said that while Mr. Chalamet’s hustler energy and confident swagger, however much in character, proved grating over time, by contrast Mr. Jordan’s modesty increasingly endeared him to Oscar voters, in particular his dignified response to being racially abused from the stage last month at the BAFTA Awards, together with fellow black “Sinners” nominee Delroy Lindo, by an attendee suffering from Tourette syndrome. As for Mr. Chalamet’s loss, the consultant added the snub called to mind another actor’s surprise Oscar loss over 35 years ago, when Tom Cruise lost out on best actor for his performance in “Born on the Fourth of July” to Daniel Day-Lewis for “My Left Foot.” Mr. Chalamet and Mr. Cruise share the same initials but while they are very different personalities, the consultant added, “Both of them were seen as the leading young actors of their generation. I can’t help recall though, that it was said in the aftermath of Tom Cruise losing the Oscar in 1990 it would only be a matter of time before he won one. All these years later and he’s still waiting for his first competitive Oscar.”

Debate Intensifies Over the Merits of Timothée Chalamet’s Oscar Loss

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