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      in Movies

      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

    • 138 Shares169 Views

      in Television

      Lynne Marie Stewart, Miss Yvonne on ‘Pee-wee’s Playhouse,’ Dies at 78

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      She was the “most beautiful woman in Puppetland” in the 1980s children’s show starring Paul Reubens, and more recently had a recurring role in “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.”Lynne Marie Stewart, who played Pee-wee Herman’s perky, bouffant-wigged neighbor, Miss Yvonne, in the 1980s children’s television series “Pee-wee’s Playhouse” and the sweet, timorous mother of one of the main characters in “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” died on Friday in Los Angeles. She was 78.The cause of her death, at her sister’s home, was cancer, said her manager, Bette Smith. Her doctors found a tumor shortly after Ms. Stewart finished filming a movie called “The Dink,” a comedy starring Jake Johnson and Ben Stiller, in December, Ms. Smith said.Ms. Stewart played a variety of characters in a career that spanned six decades, and had nearly 150 credits as a screen, stage and voice actress starting in 1971, according to IMDb, the entertainment database.But she was perhaps best known for her role as Miss Yvonne, or “the most beautiful woman in Puppetland,” in “Pee-wee’s Playhouse,” which ran for five seasons on Saturday mornings on CBS.She was a fixture on the show as Pee-wee Herman’s extravagant neighbor with creative hairdos and a chipper personality.With its whimsical and slyly subversive sense of humor, the show swiftly attracted an audience beyond its core demographic of preadolescent children, and Ms. Stewart and other members of its cast embraced its anarchic and surreal spirit of make-believe.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

    • 88 Shares189 Views

      in Television

      The Restaurant Where ‘S.N.L.’ Celebrates Tuesday Night

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      Lattanzi doesn’t exactly scream “celebrity magnet.”Its brick-walled, burgundy-carpeted dining room, lined with black-and-white photos of Rome, feels more antique than affluent. The menu leans on old Italian standbys like veal scaloppine and chicken piccata. There’s no bouncer, no photos of famous regulars, no gatekeeping host. The location isn’t some trendy downtown neighborhood, but Restaurant Row, a stretch of West 46th Street that’s been a theater-district fixture for nearly a century.Yet every Tuesday evening before a new episode of “Saturday Night Live,” Lattanzi is where you’ll find Lorne Michaels, the show’s creator and kingpin, and that week’s celebrity host, along with a rotating cadre of eight or so carefully chosen “S.N.L.” producers, writers and cast members.After decades at the helm — the show will celebrate its 50th anniversary this weekend — Mr. Michaels is well-known for his rituals: the basket of popcorn kept replenished at his desk, the so-called “Lornewalks” he takes to clear his head, and the Monday meetings in his office with the cast and host, said Susan Morrison, an articles editor at The New Yorker who wrote the forthcoming biography “Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live.”Lattanzi, which specializes in Roman food, has been around since 1984. Mr. Michaels has been bringing celebrities and staff members there for decades.Nico Schinco for The New York TimesBut the Tuesday dinners are especially sacred, she said — one of the few predictable events in the weekly lead-up to a show that traffics in unpredictability.“In a week where everything is going 100 miles an hour and everything is hurtling toward Saturday night at 11:30, it was a moment of civilized calm,” she said.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

    • 88 Shares149 Views

      in Movies

      Marianne Faithfull Was an Unforgettable Style Paragon

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      Marianne Faithfull, who died on Thursday at 78, “seemed to touch all the moments,” helping define the look of the 1960s with an influence that is still seen today.She was a figure out of fiction, right down to her Jane Austen name. The daughter of a baroness and a British major (a spy during World War II), Marianne Faithfull — who died this week at 78 — was discovered by the Rolling Stones’ manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, at a record release party in the 1960s while still in her teens. “My first move was to get a Rolling Stone as a boyfriend,” she was often quoted as having said. “I slept with three and decided the lead singer was the best bet.”The bet paid off for both parties. Mick Jagger and Ms. Faithfull dated from 1966-70 and during that time she recorded a series of pop songs, most memorably “As Tears Go By.” Mr. Jagger wrote imperishable Stones hits like “Wild Horses” under the direct inspiration of Ms. Faithfull — lovely, feckless, druggie and unfettered. She was “a wonderful friend,” Mr. Jagger wrote on Instagram this week, “a beautiful singer and a great actress.”She was also a style paragon from the outset.“She seemed to touch all the moments, from Mod to rich hippie to bad girl and punk, corsets to leather to the nun outfit she wore when she performed with Bowie,” the designer Anna Sui said this week by phone. “She was there, through all those periods — performing, participating in events, acting and singing and also in the tabloids, very much in the eyes of anybody loving those periods.”Ms. Faithfull was introduced to much of the world through her relationship with Mick Jagger, but her style and talent made her fame last.PA Images, via Getty ImagesA British journalist once described Ms. Faithfull, in the late 1960s, as “the flowing-haired, miniskirted, convention-knocking epitome” of a “drug generation” that her elders were challenged to understand. What more accurately she epitomized was a spirit of bohemian laissez-faire better located in class than any particular era.Cultured, if not conventionally educated, Ms. Faithfull was as offhand about her looks as only a natural beauty could afford to be. And she was as indifferent to the strait-jacketing conventions of the bourgeoisie as those of her background (she spent her early years in an upscale commune her father founded in Oxfordshire) often are.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

    • 163 Shares169 Views

      in Theater

      Chappell Roan, Kai Cenat, Shannon Sharpe Are Among Our Breakout Stars of 2024

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      Audacious, original and wielding a clear vision, the stars who rose to the top in 2024 pushed boundaries and took bold, even risky, choices. Here are 10 artists who shook up their scenes and resonated with fans this year.Pop MusicChappell RoanIt’s almost incomprehensible to think that last year, Chappell Roan still had time to work as a camp counselor.It’s not that she hadn’t been pursuing pop. Her debut album, “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess,” was released in 2023. One of its now-hit singles “Pink Pony Club” was released back in 2020.But it was this year that all the pieces coalesced: Her album hit No. 2 on the Billboard 200 album chart and No. 1 in album sales; her extravagant drag-inspired persona, 1980s-influenced pop sound, soaring vocals and edgy performances have become wildly viral; she outgrew her tour plans; and her dance-along anthem “Hot to Go!” was even featured in a Target ad and played at sporting events.All the while, her lyrics tackle queer issues frankly. Her track “Good Luck, Babe!” — about a relationship between two women that collapses because one is, as Roan has put it, “denying fate” — was one of the biggest hits of the summer.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

    • 163 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      At Opening Night at La Scala, Opera Is the Center of the Universe

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      Television reporters stood shoulder to shoulder delivering breathless, minute-by-minute commentary, part of a pack of more than 120 journalists from 10 countries.Celebrities, politicians and titans of industry walked the red carpet past paparazzi and officers standing sentry with capes, sashes, swords and plumed hats.Outside, protesters used firecrackers, smoke bombs and even manure as they sought to seize on the occasion to draw attention to a variety of causes.It was not a global summit, a Hollywood premiere or a royal procession. It was the start of the new opera season at Teatro alla Scala in Milan.Opera may be starved for attention in much of the world. But at La Scala, the storied theater that gave world premieres of works by Donizetti, Puccini, Rossini and Verdi, opera can still feel like the center of the cultural universe. It remains a matter of national pride and patrimony, a political football and an obsession for devoted fans.“This is sacred for us,” said the critic Alberto Mattioli, who writes for La Stampa, an Italian newspaper. “Opera is our religion.”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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      in Movies

      The Fleeting Comforts of the Celebrity Look-Alike Contest

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      It may be a coincidence that the celebrity look-alike competition returned to prominence just as American citizens were voting in what some called “the most significant presidential election in our lifetimes.” But once it happened, the appeal was obvious. Here was a different kind of democratic event: a totally insignificant one, in which attractive men with slightly off-kilter features were lined up in public and ranked by the roaring crowd.At the first contest, which convened a flock of Timothée Chalamet doubles in Manhattan last month, the New York Police Department showed up, deemed it an “unscheduled demonstration” and arrested four people. It was, in fact, only the police presence that made the event feel anything like a protest — as if the crowd were truly fighting for the right to be meaningless and absurd.In the coming weeks, as President-elect Trump revved up for his second term, doppelgängers were crowned of Jeremy Allen White in Chicago, Paul Mescal in Dublin, Dev Patel in San Francisco and Harry Styles in London. It was as if each city were electing its boyfriend. It all provided a populist diversion, though one with diminishing returns.These events have been comforting in their modesty. They are typically publicized with posters on lampposts, staged in public parks and accompanied by meager prizes. The Mescal double won 20 euro “or three pints”; the White winner received $50 and a pack of Marlboro Reds.Despite the stingy rewards, the contestants are frequently impressive — men seizing a long-awaited opportunity to put a useless talent to work. Each contest unfolds like a human scavenger hunt. The winner is a kind of modern Cinderella, the one unsung city boy who happens to slip perfectly into a fuzzy Willy Wonka hat or the blue chef’s apron worn by the star of “The Bear.”Part of what makes the searches feel pleasantly trivial is that they center on male celebrities (though not all of the contestants have been men). A Zendaya look-alike contest held in Oakland, Calif., this week is the rare exception. The public ranking of women risks activating an ugly history; it makes the apolitical political again. But also: Mimicking Hollywood femininity may require a degree of effort that intensifies the proceedings. The contest could inspire feats of makeup application, hairstyling, boob tape. The masculine look-alike, on the other hand, must simply exist. He’s just waiting to be discovered.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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      in Music

      How One Man’s Tale of Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs Sex Tapes Landed Him in Court

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      Courtney Burgess, a one-time music industry bit player, said he had videos showing encounters involving celebrities. Prosecutors recently subpoenaed him.In federal court, the music mogul Sean Combs is facing a sweeping indictment that accuses him of running a criminal enterprise that engaged in sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy.Online, a cottage industry of amateur sleuths, speculators and self-described past associates have accused him, often with little grounding, of far worse.After Mr. Combs was charged in September, the social media theorizing about rampant celebrity debauchery and additional victims only grew more feverish and conspiratorial. Soon, a man began showing up on true crime podcasts claiming he had been given videos that showed sexual encounters involving Mr. Combs and a variety of other stars, including some he said looked to be inebriated and underage.Media outlets have received anonymous emails offering to negotiate deals to provide the supposed footage, but none have published any images and it remains unclear whether such videos even exist.Yet in a startling twist that brought the internet rumor mill into the U.S. court system, prosecutors recently subpoenaed Courtney Burgess, the man who said he had the explosive videos, to testify in front of a grand jury considering additional charges against Mr. Combs.The surfacing of Mr. Burgess, a one-time music industry bit player, has only amped up the circuslike frenzy surrounding the case. With much of the investigation shrouded in secrecy, it is unclear whether the prosecutors view Mr. Burgess as a possible new witness — the keeper of a smoking gun — or simply wanted to test the online bluster of someone seeking to be part of the action.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