Marty Lose Steam: How Timothée Chalamet Went From Oscar Fave to Biggest Loser

If you need solid proof of a change in mood around an Oscar campaign, look no further than what the bookies are saying. As recently as February 21, betting aggregators were giving Timothée Chalamet, star of Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, a 78% chance of winning Best Actor for his performance in that mid-century ping pong prodigy joint. 

After the remarkable events of the last two weeks, however, that number has plummeted by more than half, with Sinners star Michael B. Jordan now the unlikely front-runner coming into the final furlong of a particularly tumultuous awards season.

In the explainer below, we’ll look at the timeline of Chalamet’s eventful Oscar campaign and try to get to the bottom of how Hollywood’s golden boy went from Oscar favourite to, potentially, this weekend’s biggest loser. 

Where Did Chalamet’s Oscar Buzz Start?

If a book is ever written on this story — and trust me, books have been written on far less eventful things — it will likely begin in the late Autumn of 2024 and the premiere of A Complete Unknown. 

Almost immediately after reviews started coming out for James Mangold’s biopic, critics were falling over each other to praise the lengths that Chalamet had gone to perfect Dylan’s guitar playing and idiosyncratic singing voice. Naturally, Searchlight Pictures went on the full awards offensive, with Chalamet seemingly ready to throw everything at the wall in pursuit of what looked like a very winnable Best Actor award.

This included an Instagram livestream that resembled a piece of performance art and a rare dual host and musical guest role on SNL, on which he performed a few of his favourite Dylan tracks. This led to a surprise win at SAG, where the actor was commended for speaking candidly about wanting to be one of the greats. Still, when Oscar night came around, it was Adrien Brody whose name was called out for The Brutalist — a twist of fate that simultaneously denied Chalamet his final chance of breaking Brody’s long-standing record as the youngest actor to ever win the award. 

What Can A Complete Unknown Tell Us About Marty Supreme’s Oscar Chances?

If you were to write this story as a great American tragedy, that night would surely be its “Rosebud”. You can almost picture the Hollywood sports movie version: the dead-eyed closeup as Brody ascends to the stage and the fade to black, then “eight months later”, then the buzzy reports as the impossibly hyped golden boy makes his comeback with another mid-century biopic of a gifted American striver, this time without the added baggage of Dylanite nay-sayers and, with Safdie, one of the trendiest and most sought-after filmmakers on the planet. 

We see the electric atmosphere at the surprise NYFF premiere as the film quickly rises to an ecstatic 93% on Rotten Tomatoes, an 83% audience score, a 4.1 on Letterboxd, and many critics naming it among the best of the year.

Outside of all the acclaim, the actor was commendably determined to make the $70M-budgeted film a financial hit with regular audiences — indeed, everything about the Marty rollout seemed to take what worked with Chalamet’s previous marketing strategy and pumped it to 11. Brat co-creator Aiden Zamiri was brought in to lead the charge and effectively did for the movie’s orange ping-pong balls what he and Charlie XCX had done with that now-iconic shade of green. 

A zippy was launched that became the must-have clothing item of the year, one that Chalamet managed to get into the hands of everyone from Michael Phelps to Tom Brady to Susan Boyle. Timmy stood on top of the Las Vegas Sphere and rapped with EsDeeKid. He worked it and worked it and worked it, seemingly managing to keep things always, just about, on the right side of palatable — until all of a sudden, he didn’t. 

Where Did Chalamet’s Marty Supreme Oscar Campaign Go Wrong?

Honestly, given that we’ve now been living on the Chalamet campaign trail for what basically feels like a year and a half, it’s almost surprising that a bog-standard over-saturation backlash didn’t come sooner. 

What saved it was Chalamet’s nose for when to fire the thrusters and when to cool things down. Indeed, having successfully helped to make the movie a genuine hit, the actor was quick to switch from mimicking his character’s gnawing braggadocio in public appearances to, gratefully, return to his typically thoughtful and forthright yet relatively modest self. Around that time, he won the Golden Globe for Best Actor: Musical or Comedy and followed it up with an expected Oscar nomination. Only then did the wheels come off. 

First came a brief scandal involving Safdie’s alleged treatment of a young actress on the set of Good Time in 2016, but for some reason, even in what was by then a relatively smooth awards season, it didn’t seem to hold. The next snag came when Chalamet lost Best Actor at the BAFTAs to Robert Aramayo for I Swear — a huge shock that most pundits chalked up to a case of a charismatic local star with home advantage managing to nip through in a tightly run race. 

That weekend, in hindsight, turned out to be far more consequential for the actor's appearance on CNN for a candid with his Interstellar co-star Matthew McConaughey, during which Chalamet once again spoke up about his ambitions, though this time with a decidedly misjudged comment that immediately enraged the ballet and opera communities before gradually seeping out into wider online visibility. 

As that clip continued to gather steam online, Oscar voting opened on February 27, just two days before Chalamet lost — again, in an enormous upset — to Michael B. Jordan at the Actor Awards (formerly SAG), prompting his Oscar odds to go into freefall. 

Are Chalamet’s Missteps Enough to Tank an Entire Oscar Campaign?

At the time of writing, it kind of looks like it might be. By the time Oscar voting closed last weekend, Chalamet had become the internet’s main character in all the wrong ways — with everyone from Whoopi Goldberg (an Academy voter, lest we forget) to his former high school principal taking turns to hang him out to dry. Whether it was a case of oversaturation or simply another example of the Internet’s love of a good schadenfreude pile-on, it seems to have been the straw that broke the camel’s back. 

When these races come down to the final stretches, narrative is what tends to decide the outcome — and Jordan’s genuine shock and humbled acceptance speech at the Actor awards might just have been enough to turn a number of those wary Chalamet voters (many of whom were already caught up in the surge of momentum behind Coogler’s movie) to his cause. 

All, of course, will be revealed in the wee hours of Monday morning. To quote the heroine of the 76-year-old movie that Sinners only recently surpassed as the most nominated in Oscar history: “Fasten your seatbelts, it's going to be a bumpy night.”