Timothée Chalamet Should Win an Oscar for His Oscar Campaign

Democracy is broken, they say. The wants of the electorate are contradictory and rooted in base emotions rather than rational thought. Viable alternatives are nonexistent, so we treat the ensuing insanity as a spectator sport, posting impotently as the world burns. I could be talking about electoral politics, but in this instance I am actually talking about Oscar campaigns.

We as individuals do not cast the ballots that determine the year’s best actor or finest cinematographer or most evocative sound design. That privilege falls to a shadowy elite, who decide these things based on their personal aesthetic judgments — but also, it turns out, based on larger narratives that all of us get to judge, narratives about who has achieved true stardom or whose moment has come. It’s a strange arrangement: The public has no official say, and yet our collective gut-check vibes appear to influence the result just the same. Hence the Oscar campaign, which aims not just to persuade academy voters that a given contender deserves their support, but also to create a good story around it — and, ideally, a culture-wide consensus that the nominee’s victory is nearly inevitable.

The 2025 race has been weirder than most. Three campaigns stand out — one weirdly funny, one weirdly disastrous and one weirdly endearing. The funny one involved the movie adaptation of the Broadway musical “Wicked.” An endless promotional push surrounded the film’s November release, and a clear bid for Oscar recognition followed, but the highlight of the whole thing was its strangest moment: a journalist solemnly informing the two lead actresses, Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo, that fans of the film were “holding space” for the lyrics of the breakout song “Defying Gravity.” Erivo was visibly moved by this news; Grande then reached out to hold Erivo’s pointer finger. Both women appeared to be on the verge of tears. The moment was so eerie and absurd that it was rehashed online for weeks. Maybe it helped: Each woman did ultimately secure an Oscar nomination.

The disaster involved “Emilia Pérez,” the polarizing Spanish-language French musical crime film about a transgender Mexican cartel leader. For a moment, this looked like the film to beat: It won the Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and garnered 13 Oscar nominations, including best picture, best director and best actress. But it was quickly subsumed by a series of controversies. There was criticism, from L.G.B.T.Q. advocates, that the film was “a step backward for trans representation”; there was negative coverage from the Mexican press about how the country was portrayed. Most devastating, there were unearthed social media posts by the film’s star, Karla Sofía Gascón, disparaging George Floyd and Islam, among other hot-button topics — most likely torpedoing the chances of the first openly transgender actor nominated for an Oscar.

Then there was the third offensive, the one credited with “making Oscar campaigning fun again.” Timothée Chalamet claimed a best-actor nomination, his second, for his lead role in the Bob Dylan biopic “A Complete Unknown” — a film he’s quite good in, especially when he evokes Dylan’s unique blend of mumbly insouciance and magnetic star power. His status as a favorite slipped after he lost out on early awards. But his campaign has been something else: not just fun, but a genuine masterpiece of self-promotion.

It has scored so many hits, across so many platforms, that it’s helpful to break them into categories. In October, when Chalamet showed up to a Timothée Chalamet look-alike contest (and later posed with the winner at the Golden Globes), it made for the kind of charming general-interest story that would be shared widely on Facebook. When he appeared in a video with the internet personality Nardwuar and talked about how “I rip Milk Duds” at the movies: That one serviced a slightly different segment, the “extremely online.” Elsewhere he would give special attention to the niche demographic of “Bob Dylan nerds,” to which I personally belong. On Instagram, he posted a video of himself listening to the 1980s outtake “Blind Willie McTell.” Even more specific was a reference to Dylan’s bizarre, bewigged appearance at the 2003 Sundance premiere of his own Dylan movie, “Masked and Anonymous” — Chalamet copied that wardrobe at the New York premiere of “A Complete Unknown,” a gesture that only the most committed Dylanologists would fully appreciate.