Is It Timmy’s Time?!

At Sunday night’s Screen Actors Guild Awards, a Best Actor race that felt like Adrien Brody’s to lose (even Kieran Culkin thought so!) got shaken up by a 29-year-old College GameDay analyst in a leather suit. Timothée Chalamet’s performance as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown was the favorite among his fellow actors, and after a speech that was a little kooky, a lot sincere, and perhaps announced his plans for world domination, we’re left with the question of what this last-minute curveball might mean for the Oscars race. Is Brody still the front-runner to win his second Oscar for playing architect László Tóth in The Brutalist, or does Chalamet’s insurgency in what many consider to be the most predictive precursor for actors herald an upset?

Our Nate Jones and Joe Reid are here to hash it out.

Nate Jones: Oscar voting ended last week, so there’s no chance of Timmy’s #grindset-inspired acceptance speech swaying Academy members one way or another. But while the SAG results won’t influence the Oscars race, they may reflect voters’ tastes. Over the past few seasons, the guild and the Academy have been in near lockstep regarding the individual acting winners. So, Joe, does that make you optimistic about young Chalamet ending next weekend tangled up in gold?

Joe Reid: I do deeply want Timothée to win for this performance for a few reasons: I really like him in general, I like his performance in A Complete Unknown in particular, people were so reflexively mean about the idea of this movie when it was first announced, and — as was the case with Wonka — I like when Timmy proves the haters wrong. But you’re right to point out that, with Oscar voting closed, his win won’t be able to change anyone’s vote. But SAG remains a valuable precursor because, as we Oscar folks always like to remind people, the largest branch in the Academy is actors, and SAG is a good indicator of where their preferences lie.

Looking back through the last tenish years, SAG tends to give Best Actor to the current Oscar front-runner, or, in the case of a close race, they tend to nudge the eventual Oscar winner to the front of the pack: Cillian Murphy besting Paul Giamatti last year, The Artist’s Jean Dujardin elbowing his way past Brad Pitt (for Moneyball) and George Clooney (The Descendants). The last time that SAG gave Best Actor to someone who wasn’t at that time the favorite in the Oscars race was in 2017 when Denzel Washington won for Fences over Manchester by the Sea’s Casey Affleck. Denzel still lost the Oscar, though, which doesn’t bode super-well for Chalamet.

Where I think this year could be different is that the Best Actor race has been weirdly narrative free all season. While Brody kept winning everything, I have never felt a strong drumbeat to bestow him with a second Oscar. He’s great in The Brutalist, but nobody’s really calling the performance “revelatory” or “once in a lifetime” or any of the other signifiers that a performance is too big to fail with Oscar. At the same time, none of the other nominees have much narrative behind them either. Hardly anyone talked about Ralph Fiennes getting nominated for the first time in almost 30 years. Sing Sing’s lack of a Best Picture nod put a lid on any Colman Domingo momentum. I’ve been waiting all season for a story line to break through, and with Chalamet we might finally have it: Talented young thing takes on American musical icon and succeeds. Works for me!

Nate: I think you’re right about the narrative element of Timmy’s candidacy. There was certainly a little bit of a coronation feeling to his SAG win — fellow actors lifting him up and acclaiming him the biggest star of his generation. I wonder, though, whether this same dynamic will play at the Oscars. If there’s one thing we know about the Academy, it’s that they are highly resistant to giving awards to young men. Just think of Chalamet’s Dune co-star Austin Butler, who learned this lesson two years ago: Despite winning the BAFTA for Elvis, another musical biopic, Butler lost the Oscar to Brendan Fraser of The Whale. Or, indeed, the other actor Chalamet is most often compared to: Leonardo DiCaprio, who had to go on an RFK diet on The Revenant before voters deemed him worthy of an Oscar. If you’re a young hunk, Oscar voters need to feel you’ve really earned it before they’ll hand you that trophy.

For Timmy, especially, I don’t know if voters will feel he has. One of the Oscar strategists I spoke to last week mentioned how unconventional his campaign has been. He’s largely eschewed the kind of in-person glad-handing that Adrien Brody’s been doing in favor of new-media appearances and viral stunts. Essentially, he’s run the kind of campaign we were all begging Kamala Harris to run a few months ago. I can see how that would have played great with SAG voters: Not only is the guild’s membership younger than the Academy’s, it also includes a bunch of online influencers who’ve unionized through AFTRA. (The ethos of solidarity prevents me from writing a punch line here.) The awards strategist I spoke to thought Chalamet’s campaign was a breath of fresh air and would probably get copied by other Oscar hopefuls in the future. But even they were up in the air about whether it would appeal to the Academy’s members, who tend to be a little older — and perhaps a little stodgier.

Joe: Your Austin Butler point is well taken, though I do wonder at what point we should start reexamining our priors about the Academy, now that it is both larger and younger than it used to be. Recent Oscar wins by Eddie Redmayne and Rami Malek are a sign that Oscar voters aren’t allergic to men in their 30s (something Timmy will be in less than one year). I also like the symmetry of it all: Chalamet wins and takes the mantle of youngest Best Actor winner ever away from — that’s right — Adrien Brody. And if he can manage to avoid forcibly making out with Emma Stone when he takes the stage, we’re looking at real progress!

Nate: Thank you for bringing up the Brody of it all, because that’s the other main reason I’m still feeling a little bearish on Chalamet’s chances. It’s clear that SAG did not like The Brutalist; they didn’t nominate it for Best Cast, and they left both Felicity Jones and Guy Pearce out of their supporting categories. The Academy, by contrast, liked Brady Corbet’s film quite a bit — enough to give it ten nominations. I’d disagree with your point about people gushing about Brody — people who love The Brutalist do tend to effuse about his performance — but I think you’re right that his campaign is focused less on his own individual journey and more on his film as a whole. The argument is if you love The Brutalist, then you should vote for the Brutalist. (A similar message is at play over in Best Director, where Corbet’s bid basically boils down to “I am the Brutalist.”)

I don’t know if that’s as much a hindrance for Brody as you claim, though, given the mixed track record for so-called narrative picks at the Oscars recently. Having a great narrative worked for Brendan Fraser, of course, and could soon pay off for Demi Moore. But we’ve also seen actors like Frances McDormand and Emma Stone win second or third trophies over nominees with better stories. When that happens, it’s usually because they’re repping a major Best Picture contender — something I think applies to Brody and The Brutalist this year.

Still, I’m with you in digging the added unpredictability that Chalamet’s SAG win has added to the race. Oscar season gets boring when it’s the same four people winning over and over again! It’s exciting to feel that something is happening here, but I don’t know what it is — just like another Mr. Jones.

Related

• The Screen Actors Guild Award Winners
• That’s What It’s Like When Timothée Chalamet Gives an Acceptance Speech?