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      Timothée Chalamet Should Win an Oscar for His Oscar Campaign

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      Lobbying the public to attract the votes of the academy is an odd practice — but you can’t say Chalamet hasn’t excelled at it.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.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Exterior Night’ Review: Life in Perilous Times

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      The Italian master Marco Bellocchio turns to TV, revisiting the mysteries of the Aldo Moro affair.When the great Italian filmmaker Marco Bellocchio made “Good Morning, Night” in 2003, about the 1978 kidnapping and killing of the politician Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades, he provided a fanciful, heartbreaking coda: an image of Moro walking away from captivity, looking not much worse for wear after 55 days in a small cell.Bellocchio revisits the Moro affair in his first television series, “Exterior Night,” and once again he frees Moro (Fabrizio Gifuni) for just a bit. This time the scholarly, prickly statesman gets to stare down his colleagues in Italy’s Christian Democratic Party and tell them exactly how and why they have allowed him to die.(Released in 2022, the series is now available in the United States on MHz Choice, where the third and fourth of six episodes will stream beginning Tuesday.)Moro’s abduction and death was a watershed moment in the “years of lead,” when politically motivated bombings, shootings, kidnappings and assassinations convulsed Italy and other European countries. But it is a story that can speak to anyone who has a sense of living in perilous times. As a character in “Exterior Night” says, a society can tolerate a certain amount of crazy behavior, but “when the crazy party has the majority, we’ll see what happens.”What makes Moro’s fate such prime material for dramatization, though, are its elements of mystery and imponderability and its hints of conspiracy, as murky today as they were four decades ago. Why did Moro’s own government — of which he would have become president later that year — refuse to negotiate for his release? Why did the Red Brigades finally kill him, knowing it probably would be disastrous for their cause?“Good Morning, Night,” told from the point of view of a female captor who begins to sympathize with Moro, was a splendid film, both passionate and razor sharp. Working across five and a half hours in “Exterior Night,” Bellocchio spreads out, adding historical detail and giving space to players he had little or no room for in the film.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Jane Fonda’s SAG Awards Speech: ‘Empathy Is Not Weak or Woke’

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      While some stars have been less politically outspoken this awards season, she issued a call to action as she accepted a lifetime achievement award from the Screen Actors Guild.Jane Fonda, who has been politically outspoken since the Vietnam War era, urged people “to resist successfully what is coming at us” as she accepted a lifetime achievement award Sunday night during the Screen Actors Guild Awards.“Make no mistake, empathy is not weak or woke,” said Fonda, 87. “And by the way, woke just means you give a damn about other people.”She never explicitly mentioned President Trump or his administration, but she seemed to allude to them as she warned of bad things to come.“A whole lot of people are going to be really hurt by what is happening, what is coming our way,” Fonda said. “Even if they are of a different political persuasion, we need to call upon our empathy and not judge but listen from our hearts and welcome them into our tent. Because we are going to need a big tent to resist successfully what is coming at us.”Fonda, a two-time Academy Award winner, has long been known for political activism, particularly her support for the civil rights movement and Indigenous rights and for her opposition to the Vietnam War. A 1972 visit to North Vietnam led some critics to call her “Hanoi Jane”; she has since apologized to soldiers and veterans for being photographed there on an antiaircraft gun. In more recent years, she has fought to draw attention to the climate crisis.In her acceptance speech, she expressed her strong support for unions and noted that when she was starting out in the late 1950s, some leading Hollywood figures had been prominently resisting McCarthyism. She also said that she believes Americans are currently facing the same kinds of challenges that have been captured in historical documentaries about social movements, including apartheid, the civil rights movement and the Stonewall Rebellion.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Test Yourself on These Screen Adaptations of Popular Books

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      Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about books that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions, video games and more. This week’s challenge is focused on books with a sharp comic edge that were adapted for the screen. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and their filmed versions. More

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      SAG Awards 2025’s Unforgettable Looks: Selena Gomez, Pamela Anderson & More

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      It has been a busy weekend in Hollywood. On Saturday, stars paraded down carpets at the Film Independent Spirit Awards and the N.A.A.C.P. Image Awards. Less than 24 hours later, they were at it again for the 31st Screen Actors Guild Awards.The ceremony, held at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, honored acting achievements in television and film. Like other events this awards season, it also recognized those whose lives have been upended by the Los Angeles wildfires, including members of the Los Angeles Fire Department, some of whom walked the carpet in their dress uniforms.Other attendees’ attire was more flamboyant. A handful of actresses — Mikey Madison, Brooke Shields and Moeka Hoshi among them — chose silvery gowns that glimmered like disco balls or freshly minted coins. Actors like Jeff Goldblum and Colman Domingo accessorized their formal wear with scarves and sparkly jewelry. But of all the looks seen on the carpet at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, these 14, for various reasons, stood out more than most.Cynthia Erivo: Most Space Blanket!Allison Dinner/EPA, via ShutterstockThe “Wicked” star’s ensemble, which was made of woven silver fabric that fringed at the edges, resembled a fancy version of the foil blankets worn by runners after marathons. The piece, in fact, was archival Givenchy from the label’s Alexander McQueen era.Pamela Anderson: Most Angelic!Richard Shotwell/Invision, via Associated PressWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Singular Charm of Parker Posey

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      One January morning, I arrived at the East Village studio of a “sound facilitator,” prepared to heal. The facilitator introduced himself as Gary. He led me past a refrigerator cloaked in an Indian tapestry and into an emptied living room, where I found Parker Posey perched cross-legged on a mat, facing a row of gongs. She appeared cozy and at ease, as if she had known the gongs for many years. Posey had invited me there to experience a sound bath, a New Age therapy that she first tried in Thailand, where she filmed the third season of the HBO anthology series “The White Lotus.” During a sound bath (according to Gary’s website), various chimes and bowls are played in an intentional therapeutic sequence; the treatment may uplift the spirit, release stuck energies and rouse engagement with the surrounding environment. Or it may not, but Gary seemed nice anyway.I joined Posey on the floor. The room filled with sounds that resembled the wait music for a planetarium. Gary then advised us that we were approaching the first full moon of the year, which he called “the wolf moon.” Posey turned to face me with spooked eyes, her mouth pulled into an arc of wry expectation. Then she stretched her legs high in the air, laid flat on the mat, and piled a sweater atop her face.Ninety minutes later, the two of us burst onto the street as if from a saloon door. When I arrived at the appointment, we were both wearing flowy black pants and black sweaters, and I was pleased I had guessed the correct attire for our encounter. But by the time we left, she had applied her Parker Posey costume over the base layer: earrings like glass shards, a pearl hair clip in the shape of a vine-picked berry, a slippery high-necked plaid overshirt, a prismatic silk scarf and a pair of round rose-tinted glasses. We walked in woozy circles around the village. Occasionally she produced her phone and waved its digital map in front of us as if it were a homing device. Whatever had happened up in Gary’s studio — brain-wave entrainment, or maybe just a permission structure for taking a film-length nap — my spirit was in fact uplifted, and Posey was engaged with her surrounding environment.To walk alongside Posey is to be reminded that a New York City sidewalk is a habitat still teeming with life. “Ha ha ha HA,” she said as we closed in on a poodle in a little sweater. “Yeah, I speak poodle!” she trilled to another. Manhattan’s pedestrians typically navigate its steroidal landscape in a dissociative state, but with Posey, every poodle is acknowledged, every commotion registered. A car drove up beside us and stopped at a light, blasting an accordion-forward Latin track. “I love this song!” she screamed to its occupants, craning her head toward the open window. Once she squatted on the sidewalk to greet a familiar dog, then crept over to retie both of my sneakers in double knots. “That was so fun, tying your shoelaces,” she said as she sprang up. “I’m a little mommy.”In the coming weeks, whenever I told anyone that I was profiling Parker Posey, they invariably had a story about her impish appearance in their own life. A journalist colleague said that as she reported to work on Sept. 12, 2001, Posey drifted past her, roller-skating through Lower Manhattan. Seemingly everyone below 14th Street has had a pleasant encounter with her at a dog run. Walton Goggins, Posey’s friend and co-star in “The White Lotus,” told me that when he first met her, at a friend’s barbecue in the Catskills, he felt instantly drawn into her world. “She has this fairylike quality about her,” he said. “She’s a person capable of doing what Emerson said so long ago — to see the miraculous in the common. And she uses phrases like, Isn’t that a gas?” Natasha Rothwell, who plays the weary spa manager, Belinda, on “The White Lotus,” said in an email that when Posey first approached her on set, Posey said she had lost her wallet and had just said a prayer to Saint Anthony, before asking Rothwell if she wanted to be her neighbor at the hotel. “She then gave me a hug and seemed to float away.”Parker Posey with Sarah Catherine Hook and Sam Nivola in the current season of the HBO series “The White Lotus.”Fabio Lovino/HBOWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      SAG Awards: Complete List of Winners

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      The thriller about choosing a new pope took home the top film prize, while Demi Moore and Timothée Chalamet won individual honors.The papal thriller “Conclave” won the top prize at the 31st Screen Actors Guild Awards on Sunday night, thwarting a guild sweep by “Anora,” which had previously scored big wins earlier this month at ceremonies thrown by the producers, directors and writers guilds.The last three winners of SAG’s top prize — “Oppenheimer,” “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” and “CODA” — all went on to win best picture at the Oscars. Some of those had been season-long sweepers, unlike “Conclave,” which can boast only one other best-picture award, from the BAFTAs. Still, the win indicates that the Oscar race remains fluid leading up to the March 2 ceremony.SAG’s lead-actor race produced an upset victory, too, as “A Complete Unknown” star Timothée Chalamet finally nabbed a prize for his portrayal of Bob Dylan; the award had gone all season to Adrien Brody (“The Brutalist”). “I’m really in pursuit of greatness,” Chalamet said when accepting his award. “I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats,” he added.Over the last three years, every individual acting winner at SAG has gone on to repeat at the Oscars except last year’s SAG winner Lily Gladstone (“Killers of the Flower Moon”), who lost the best-actress Oscar to Emma Stone (“Poor Things”).This year’s best-actress battle is even more competitive, with “The Substance” lead Demi Moore and the “Anora” actress Mikey Madison trading industry prizes all season. And although the Golden Globe winner Fernanda Torres (“I’m Still Here”) was not nominated at the SAG Awards, she has nevertheless mounted a late surge with many Oscar voters I’ve spoken to, who have just gotten around to watching her movie.At the SAG Awards, it was Moore who triumphed. As she did at the Golden Globes in January, she gave a galvanizing speech that she dedicated to “that little girl who didn’t believe in herself.” As she grew emotional, Moore closed with, “The words are kind of beyond me. So I’m just going to have to say thank you.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      How to Watch the SAG Awards

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      In a wide-open best picture race, the awards, which are streaming on Netflix, could offer some clarity.This year’s Oscars best picture race is, for the first time in years, wide open.Will the newly ascendant front-runner “Anora,” Sean Baker’s Palme d’Or winner about a stripper who impulsively marries the son of a Russian oligarch, take the statuette? Will Brady Corbet’s epic “The Brutalist” find its way to the top? And what about the wild card, the papal thriller “Conclave,” which recently took top honors at the EE British Academy Film Awards, or BAFTAs — Britain’s version of the Oscars?With the days ticking down until the March 2 Academy Awards ceremony, the Screen Actors Guild Awards could offer some clarity. In four of the past five years, the SAGs have given their top honor — best ensemble — to the eventual Oscar winner.The 15 awards, which are voted on by actors and other performers who belong to the SAG-AFTRA union, honor the best film and television performances from the past year. The movie musical “Wicked” and the FX series “Shogun” are the leading nominees.Here’s how to watch, and what to watch for.What time does the show start, and where can I watch?The two-hour ceremony begins at 8 p.m. Eastern time (5 p.m. Pacific time) at the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, a historic venue that has also hosted the Oscars. For the second year, the awards show will stream live and exclusively on Netflix; there is no way to watch without a subscription.Is there a red carpet?The red carpet preshow will stream live on Netflix beginning at 7 p.m. Eastern time (4 p.m. Pacific time). The YouTube star Lilly Singh and the actress and former “Saturday Night Live” comedian Sasheer Zamata will host the event, which will include interviews with nominees and the announcement of the winners in the best stunt ensemble categories.Who is hosting?Kristen Bell, who recently starred in the Netflix rom-com “Nobody Wants This,” will steer the ship. This will be her second time hosting; the first was in 2018.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More