On Sunday, Timothée Chalamet might grow to be, at 29 years, two months and three days, the youngest greatest actor winner in Oscar historical past. However whether or not or not his efficiency as Bob Dylan in A Full Unknown beats out presumed frontrunner Adrien Brody – the present youngest greatest actor, at 29 years, 11 months and 9 days in 2003 – Chalamet has already received arguably crucial prize of contemporary film stardom: the hearts and minds of the web.
If we’re within the enterprise of giving out awards for deserving, boundary-pushing work, then Chalamet’s greatest actor marketing campaign – unofficial and infrequently unstated efforts to sway awards voters and construct public sentiment – deserves its personal Oscar. For the previous a number of months, ostensibly in help of A Full Unknown however seemingly simply as a lot for laughs, Chalamet has launched into a uncommon press run of constant wins that generated viral moments and appealed to the reference-averse, absurdist sensibilities of his technology, bucking the normally staid strategies of Hollywood promotion. Whereas previous greatest actor hopefuls have erred on the aspect of grateful, severe and dutiful to the self-importance of the boomer-skewing Academy, Chalamet has worn kitschy outfits to purple carpet occasions, handled social media like an ironic artwork experiment and made the rounds with influencers. In different phrases, although Chalamet is technically a millennial (born in 1995), we’re witnessing the primary genZ Oscar marketing campaign.
And what a delight it’s been. There may be a lot to be cynical about with regards to awards season – the repetition, the speeches written by consultants, the cloying campaign-ness of all of it – however Chalamet out-predicting skilled sports activities analysts on School Gameday (?!) just isn’t one in all them. The primary signal that Chalamet can be as much as one thing completely different – that he can be in on the joke – was again in October, two months earlier than the home launch of A Full Unknown, when he crashed a crowdsourced lookalike contest in New York’s Washington Sq. Park, briefly inflicting gleeful pandemonium (till the cops confirmed up). He adopted with a sequence of wacky, bizarre, shocking public appearances which have deftly threaded a needle of honest and unserious, from dressing up as Bob Dylan circa 2003’s Sundance, blond bangs and all, to remixing Dylan deep cuts on Saturday Evening Reside as one of many few musical friends who isn’t a recording artist.
A non-exhaustive checklist of highlights: driving a Lime bike on to a purple carpet (and later telling a French interviewer that he was fined £65 for unlawful parking); giving podcast bro Theo Von a lesson on publicly backed housing (Chalamet grew up in Mitchell-Lama arts housing in Manhattan); fanboying over Kendrick Lamar in a ride-along “interview” for the Tremendous Bowl; internet hosting a weird Instagram reside from an empty warehouse wherein he smashed a guitar, writhed with confetti to the 2009 Black Eyed Peas observe I Gotta Feeling, and appeared in entrance of a display with deliberately misspelled messages like “congratulations timmothee”.
For each typical, in-the-feels interview cease – a basic Critical Artist Rolling Stone cowl, 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 a number of ridiculous, internet-aiming victory laps. See: speaking Brat with oddball Canadian music journalist Nardwuar, and an absurd and pleasant interview with YouTuber Brittany Broski wherein he described his lean aesthetic as “empowering the anemic”. And that’s not even getting right into a sequence of lo-fi Instagram movies wherein Chalamet sings alongside to numerous songs – the Dylan observe Visions of Johanna, a quantity from the Name Me By Your Identify soundtrack – at varied out of doors areas in a method I can greatest describe as “aspirational performing arts college undertaking”.
All of this evinces a incontrovertible fact that many overlook: being an actor and being a film star should not the identical factor. Timothée Chalamet is a phenomenally proficient actor who, by his personal admission, strives to be thought-about one of many greats. He mentioned the quiet half out loud (uncommon) in his Sag acceptance speech every week earlier than the Oscars – his first main award after almost two dozen nominations by the age of 30: “I’m actually in pursuit of greatness,” he mentioned, sporting a lime inexperienced shirt, leather-based swimsuit and bolo tie in tribute to one other archival Dylan look. “I do know folks don’t normally discuss like that however I need to be one of many greats.”
However awards campaigns are by no means nearly expertise, and Chalamet is, crucially, nice at being a celeb. This complete press run has evinced his concurrent expertise for holding consideration within the methods he needs to, for not taking oneself too severely whereas additionally sustaining deep reverence for the craft, for balancing the esoteric and the very dumb, with some clear YouTube analysis. And largely, to chuckle at oneself in a method that additionally advantages one’s enchantment, a through-line from the lookalike contest to displaying Cooper a video of his highschool rap alter ego Timmy Tim. Chalamet is the uncommon extraordinarily well-known one that appears to truly take pleasure in being well-known – or, on the very least, is having some innocent enjoyable with it. So right here’s to Chalamet’s Oscar marketing campaign, a breath of contemporary air in a apply that tends to vary from simply reasonably pleasant to outright annoying. Particularly this yr, the Oscars season, and popular culture at massive, wanted it.
