So When’s He Getting an Oscar?

Photo: Craig Sjodin/Getty Images

In January 2018, Timothée Chalamet did something almost unthinkable for a 22-year-old actor: He got nominated for an Academy Award.

The Oscars, as a rule, don’t go for young men. While we’re used to seeing ingénues like Jennifer Lawrence, Brie Larson, and Emma Stone take home a trophy in their 20s, their male counterparts struggle for recognition against more seasoned stars. In all of Oscar history, Adrien Brody in The Pianist is the solitary Best Actor winner under 30, and only a handful each decade even get nominated. The day he made the final five for Call Me by Your Name, Chalamet became the youngest Best Actor nominee since Mickey Rooney in 1940. Chalamet’s Call Me performance was such a marvel it catapulted him onto the A-list, and it took him closer than any actor his age had ever come to pulling off the Oscar upset. (But when a dewy young hunk goes up against a middle-aged guy in makeup playing Winston Churchill, bet the jowls every time.) Since then, he has not cracked another Oscar lineup. He was almost certainly sixth place in Supporting Actor in 2019 for Beautiful Boy, showing up in all the major precursors before losing out to Vice’s Sam Rockwell on nomination morning. A year later, he had some preseason buzz for Little Women, and though his performance was well regarded, he never gained traction in a Supporting Actor field stocked with former winners. His subsequent filmography includes two more Best Picture nominees, Dune and Don’t Look Up, which gave us two very different Chalamet performances, neither of which came close to impacting the awards race. What is it going to take for Timmy Tim to win his first trophy?

Chalamet has two projects in the can: Wonka and Dune: Part Two. The chances of the chocolate-loving twink overtaking formidable contenders like Oppenheimer’s Cillian Murphy and Maestro’s Bradley Cooper are slim. And no matter how ably Chalamet rides that sandworm in Dune, the stars of effects-driven blockbusters typically don’t factor into the acting races. More promising is the film Chalamet was about to start shooting before the SAG strike hit, James Mangold’s Bob Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown. While Mangold exists in that strange space between journeyman and auteur, the man he has directed two Oscar-winning performances, including Reese Witherspoon in Walk the Line. Like Chalamet, Witherspoon at the time was a prodigious talent hoping to make the leap to adult respectability through the power of song. And if you’re hoping to overcome Oscar’s bias against young men, a music biopic is the surest way to do it. Last season, 31-year-old Austin Butler finished as the consensus runner-up for Elvis. (There’s also Rami Malek for Bohemian Rhapsody, but he was older than you’d think—a wizened 37.)

The key date for Chalamet may be 2027: the year he’ll turn 32, which Oscar history suggests is when voters stop thinking of you as a “young actor.” That’s how old Daniel Day-Lewis, Nicolas Cage, and Daniel Kaluuya were when they won their first trophies. (Even legends don’t get to skip ahead that much; Brando was 30, De Niro 31.) If we look at the career of Leonardo DiCaprio, the man he’s most often compared to, a couple of lessons jump out. First, it takes a long time for a young heartthrob to be considered Oscar worthy — DiCaprio had to wait 22 years after his Gilbert Grape nom to finally win. Second, you really don’t want to be pretty. Leo got nominated as a Hollywood playboy, a bare-chested mercenary, and a Wall Street cad, but he didn’t land an Oscar until he’d caked himself in dirt and eaten raw bison liver. That’s going to be a tough task for Chalamet, who remains even more porcelain than Leo was in his ’90s prime. Thankfully, he has a few things going for him. Chalamet has resisted the siren song of superhero franchises, which means he’s not chained to a specific cinematic universe for years. (Think of the way Marvel commitments swallowed up years of Jennifer Lawrence and Brie Larson’s post-Oscar careers.) And in certain circumstances, Chalamet’s avian delicacy could be a plus. Unlike Leo, who felt too modern for anything set before the invention of the automobile, Chalamet’s resemblance to an 18th-century Frenchman means he can believably inhabit all manner of period pieces (though as his recent Troye Sivan sketch on SNL proved, he may need to work on his accents). Another remake of Dangerous Liaisons? A film about young Abraham Lincoln? All I know is that a starched collar and morning coat could be invaluable.

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