As an ambitious table-tennis player willing to do whatever it takes to get ahead, Timothée Chalamet delivers some of his best work in “Marty Supreme” and is all but certain to earn his third Oscar nomination later this month. Winning the award, however, will require him to overcome a handicap far more daunting than anything his character faces onscreen.
For nearly a century, Oscar voters have been reluctant to hand the best-actor prize to young men, almost always opting to reward more seasoned performers. Chalamet, who turned 30 on Dec. 27, would become the second-youngest best-actor winner in academy history: Adrien Brody was 29 when he won for “The Pianist” and remains the sole man in his 20s to triumph in that top category.
Can Chalamet break that longstanding curse, or will he follow in the footsteps of Leonardo DiCaprio, whose “always a bridesmaid” status at the Oscars became a running joke throughout his 20s and 30s?
Though Oscar voters have no qualms about rewarding young actresses, they traditionally want to see more mileage on their men. Besides Chalamet, who previously earned nominations for “Call Me by Your Name” and “A Complete Unknown,” only two other men under 30 have been nominated for best actor in the last decade, Daniel Kaluuya (“Get Out”) and Paul Mescal (“Aftersun”). During that same period, seven women under 30 were nominated for best actress, and three — Brie Larson (“Room”), Emma Stone (“La La Land”) and Mikey Madison (“Anora”) — went on to win.
At industry parties and awards-season events over the years, I’ve watched that dynamic play out as older male voters eagerly chat up beautiful ingénues while showing far less interest in young hunks with Oscar buzz. If an up-and-coming actor looks like the sort of guy their granddaughter would swoon over, resistance may set in, and it can take years for that actor to earn the elders’ genuine respect.
DiCaprio can attest to that arc: When “Titanic” made him a superstar and tied the record for most Oscar wins, voters refused to even nominate him. The perception that DiCaprio was just some teenage heartthrob lingered as he moved into more mature roles in Martin Scorsese films, and the academy made him wait until age 40 to receive his first Oscar, for “The Revenant,” a grueling wilderness drama that proved he had left his youthful image far behind.
What’s the reason for that resistance? I’d wager some of it has to do with how young men like DiCaprio and Chalamet broke through in romantic roles. Though movies with those roles are some of the few that reliably cast actors under 30 — it’s where Mescal (“Normal People”), Robert Pattinson (“Twilight”) and Jacob Elordi (“The Kissing Booth) all made their names — the whiff of romance can also be a turnoff, depending on who’s sniffing.
Straight men often loathe the actors women love, a tension I call the “girlfriend gap”: In the 2010s, while analyzing celebrity data from the market-research firm E-Poll, I was struck by how many men gave rock-bottom ratings to romantic idols like Pattinson and Zac Efron simply because they knew women adored them. (Good luck to Hudson Williams and Connor Storrie, the talented leads of the breakthrough romantic series “Heated Rivalry,” who deserve major film roles but may face that same friction.)
Are Oscar voters really as reactionary as those resentful middle-American men? One would hope for a more rarefied sensibility, and with the academy diversifying in recent years, the whims of a straight-male voting bloc may carry less weight.
Still, that time-honored tradition gives me pause even when predicting nominations this year for actors like Elordi and Michael B. Jordan, who front major contenders — “Frankenstein” and “Sinners” — yet still face Oscar headwinds. Jordan in particular has never been nominated, despite work in “Black Panther” and “Creed” that was more than deserving. How much longer will they make this 38-year-old phenom wait?
By the time women like Jennifer Lawrence and Natalie Portman turned 30, the Oscars had already canonized them as among the pre-eminent performers of their generations. Chalamet and Jordan may not need that validation to continue thriving as A-listers, but I’d argue that the academy has much more to lose by continuing to overlook them.
The Oscars are so eager to attract young men to its broadcast that the ceremony will soon move to YouTube to better reach them. And recent years have seen several academy decisions — like expanding the best-picture category and proposing an Oscar for best popular film — meant to make room for more blockbuster nominees that young men may tune in to see.
So here’s a thought: If courting young men is a priority, awarding them should be more than a possibility. I’d bet that far more young men nowadays dream of being influencers than Oscar winners. But if they saw actors their own age on that stage, it may remind them that this nearly 100-year-old tradition still matters.
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and also serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The Times.
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