On Sunday night, Oscar viewers were on the edge of their seats, locked in on one of the tightest races in recent memory, to see whether One Battle After Another or Sinners would rule the night. (At the end of the evening, it was OBAA that took home Best Picture and won six awards to Sinners‘s four.) But headed into the 98th annual Academy Awards, there was one thing that was already glaringly obvious before the stars even hit the red carpet: Timothée Chalamet would not be winning Best Actor for his performance in Marty Supreme.
Chalamet, once the heavy favorite to win this year’s Oscar, saw his Vegas odds plummet after controversial comments he made about ballet and opera went viral right before ballots were due and Academy voters began anonymously telling trade publications that they find him to be a “cocky little shit.” As expected, Chalamet was a bit of a punching bag at this year’s ceremony: Host Conan O’Brien referenced the recent backlash, quipping, “Security is extremely tight tonight. I’m told there’s concerns about attacks from both the ballet and opera communities.” Filmmaker Alexandre Singh, who won Best Live-Action Short for Two People Exchanging Saliva, also made a jab in his acceptance speech, pointedly saying, “Maybe it takes 10 years’ time, but we can change society through art, through creativity, through theater and ballet.” Ballet dancer Misty Copeland, one of the many celebrities who have publicly criticized Chalamet’s comments, got a huge reception when she appeared onstage to dance as part of the performance of “I Lied to You” from Sinners — one that included a standing ovation from the Marty Supreme star himself.
But those who are furious about Balletgate seem to have largely misinterpreted what the actor actually said in that fateful CNN town hall after he was asked whether audiences still have an interest in slower-paced movies. “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,’” he said with a laugh. “All respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost 14 cents in viewership. I’m taking shots for no reason.” At no point did Chalamet say that ballet and opera are bad or uninteresting; what he was clunkily trying to say was that he didn’t want movies to experience what those two art forms did, which is fall out of the mainstream and become more niche creative endeavors whose practitioners are now tasked with preserving them. Could he have phrased it better? Of course. But ultimately Chalamet (whose own mother, grandmother and sister were all ballerinas) was trying to defend his own trade against the rising threats of AI, streaming conglomerates and shortening attention spans — all issues O’Brien also addressed in various bits throughout the show on Sunday.
But even before the ballet and opera comments picked up steam, Chalamet’s chances of finally taking home Best Actor after being nominated in the category three times before he turned 30 were slim due to all the rumblings that Oscar voters simply don’t like him as a person. There are rumors that many saw his speech at last year’s Actor Awards (still called the SAG Awards at the time), where he declared after winning Best Actor for A Complete Unknown that he’s “really in pursuit of greatness,” as arrogant. In an interview back in December, he was quoted as saying, “It’s been like seven, eight years that I feel like I’ve been handing in really, really committed, top-of-the-line performances…I don’t want people to take it for granted.”
There is no doubt that Chalamet is incredibly ambitious. In addition to saying as much, repeatedly, he’s put his money where his mouth is. He claims to have paid “over six figures out of my pocket” to perform Bob Dylan songs on Saturday Night Live, marking the first time that an actor has also served as musical guest and performed songs from a still-in-theaters biopic on the show. He was even more invested in Marty Supreme; he is rumored to have spent somewhere in the ballpark of $20 million of his own money on the movie’s marketing.
But in order to be great, you have to first believe you have the capacity for greatness. It’s not arrogance if you can back it up with results. When Michael Jordan or Michael Phelps, both mentioned by Chalamet in his SAG speech, speak confidently about their skills or display the same kind of drive, we say they have the heart of a champion. Why are actors or other creative types expected to downplay their own abilities and “aw, shucks” their way through their careers?
Moreover, why is Chalamet being held to a standard by Academy voters that so many of his peers aren’t? Let’s not pretend that he was the only “cocky little shit” in the room last night. And while Oscar voters were busy wringing their hands over Chalamet’s perceived arrogance, they went ahead and awarded Best Supporting Actor to Sean Penn, who has a long history of assaulting people and an open disdain for awards shows. Adrien Brody, who won Best Actor last year for The Brutalist, came back this year to present an award and did a bit mocking how famously long and insufferable his acceptance speech was; do we really think he doesn’t also consider himself to be “in pursuit of greatness”? (Brody is also not without his own share of controversies, including forcibly kissing Halle Berry when he won Best Actor in 2003 for The Pianist and getting himself banned from SNL for going off-script and introducing musical guest Sean Paul in a Jamaican patois.) Even Anne Hathaway, who famously bombed as an Oscar host in 2011 and took a lot of heat for being a try-hard when she won Best Actress in 2013, was welcomed back as a presenter this year.
The truth is, Chalamet was perfectly cast in Marty Supreme. He is excellent as the brash, overconfident, wildly ambitious Marty Mauser because he is also brash and overconfident and wildly ambitious in real life. He understands the passion that Mauser has for his craft and can spit out lines like, “I have a purpose. You don’t. If you think that’s some kind of blessing, it’s not. It puts me at a huge life disadvantage. It means I have an obligation to see a very specific thing through. And with obligation comes sacrifice, okay?” so superbly because that same fire burns inside of him. It is painfully obvious that Chalamet wants to be celebrated as a great actor so badly — and, like Mauser, that naked pursuit of greatness seems to have put him at a disadvantage.
There’s a lot about Chalamet that doesn’t necessarily jibe with what stuffy industry types have historically envisioned an Oscar-winning actor to be. He’s got a bold red carpet fashion sense, and he’s more likely to show up shirtless — as he did in 2022 — than show up in a boring tux. He’s dating a Kardashian. (Although it’s worth noting that Kylie Jenner has already done something none of the women 51-year-old Oscar winner Leonardo DiCaprio has dated have ever done: turned 28.) And as we’ve seen over the past few weeks, he’s got a tendency to put his foot in his mouth.
But whether the Academy voters like it or not, Chalamet is one of the most talented actors of his generation. And if the Oscars don’t want to go the way of ballet or opera, they should suck it up and embrace that.
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