On Sunday, Timothée Chalamet could become, at 29 years, two months and three days, the youngest best actor winner in Oscar history. But whether or not his performance as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown beats out presumed frontrunner Adrien Brody – the current youngest best actor, at 29 years, 11 months and nine days in 2003 – Chalamet has already won arguably the most important prize of modern movie stardom: the hearts and minds of the internet.
If we’re in the business of giving out awards for deserving, boundary-pushing work, then Chalamet’s best actor campaign – unofficial and often unspoken efforts to sway awards voters and build public sentiment – deserves its own Oscar. For the past several months, ostensibly in support of A Complete Unknown but seemingly just as much for laughs, Chalamet has embarked on a rare press run of consistent wins that generated viral moments and appealed to the reference-averse, absurdist sensibilities of his generation, bucking the usually staid methods of Hollywood promotion. Whereas past best actor hopefuls have erred on the side of grateful, serious and dutiful to the self-importance of the boomer-skewing Academy, Chalamet has worn kitschy outfits to red carpet events, treated social media like an ironic art experiment and made the rounds with influencers. In other words, though Chalamet is technically a millennial (born in 1995), we are witnessing the first genZ Oscar campaign.
And what a delight it’s been. There is plenty to be cynical about when it comes to awards season – the repetition, the speeches written by consultants, the cloying campaign-ness of it all – but Chalamet out-predicting professional sports analysts on College Gameday (?!) is not one of them. The first sign that Chalamet would be up to something different – that he would be in on the joke – was back in October, two months before the domestic release of A Complete Unknown, when he crashed a crowdsourced lookalike contest in New York’s Washington Square Park, temporarily causing gleeful pandemonium (until the cops showed up). He followed with a series of wacky, weird, surprising public appearances that have deftly threaded a needle of sincere and unserious, from dressing up as Bob Dylan circa 2003’s Sundance, blond bangs and all, to remixing Dylan deep cuts on Saturday Night Live as one of the few musical guests who isn’t a recording artist.
A non-exhaustive list of highlights: riding a Lime bike on to a red carpet (and later telling a French interviewer that he was fined £65 for illegal parking); giving podcast bro Theo Von a lesson on publicly subsidized housing (Chalamet grew up in Mitchell-Lama arts housing in Manhattan); fanboying over Kendrick Lamar in a ride-along “interview” for the Super Bowl; hosting a bizarre Instagram live from an empty warehouse in which he smashed a guitar, writhed with confetti to the 2009 Black Eyed Peas track I Gotta Feeling, and appeared in front of a screen with intentionally misspelled messages like “congratulations timmothee”.
For every conventional, in-the-feels interview stop – a classic Serious Artist Rolling Stone cover, a 60 Minutes interview with Anderson Cooper on honing his ambition, an Apple Music interview with Zane Lowe on inhabiting Dylan’s music – there have been multiple ridiculous, internet-aiming victory laps. See: talking Brat with oddball Canadian music journalist Nardwuar, and an absurd and delightful interview with YouTuber Brittany Broski in which he described his lean aesthetic as “empowering the anemic”. And that’s not even getting into a series of lo-fi Instagram videos in which Chalamet sings along to various songs – the Dylan track Visions of Johanna, a number from the Call Me By Your Name soundtrack – at various outdoor locations in a style I can best describe as “aspirational performing arts school project”.
All of this evinces a fact that many forget: being an actor and being a movie star are not the same thing. Timothée Chalamet is a phenomenally talented actor who, by his own admission, strives to be considered one of the greats. He said the quiet part out loud (unusual) in his Sag acceptance speech a week before the Oscars – his first major award after nearly two dozen nominations by the age of 30: “I’m really in pursuit of greatness,” he said, wearing a lime green shirt, leather suit and bolo tie in tribute to another archival Dylan look. “I know people don’t usually talk like that but I want to be one of the greats.”
But awards campaigns are never just about talent, and Chalamet is, crucially, great at being a celebrity. This entire press run has evinced his concurrent talent for holding attention in the ways he wants to, for not taking oneself too seriously while also maintaining deep reverence for the craft, for balancing the esoteric and the very dumb, with some clear YouTube research. And mostly, to laugh at oneself in a way that also benefits one’s appeal, a through-line from the lookalike contest to showing Cooper a video of his high school rap alter ego, Timmy Tim. Chalamet is the rare extremely famous person who seems to actually enjoy being famous – or, at the very least, is having some harmless fun with it. So here’s to Chalamet’s Oscar campaign, a breath of fresh air in a practice that tends to range from just moderately enjoyable to outright annoying. Especially this year, the Oscars season, and pop culture at large, needed it.
