Back in 2022, the indie film company A24 was the belle of the ball, racking up seven Academy Awards for the trippy, dimension-traveling film “Everything Everywhere All at Once” and proving that its audacious approach to filmmaking could impress the stodgy body that bestows the golden statuettes.
Flash-forward four years and the same hip studio showed up to the Oscars with nine nominations for “Marty Supreme,” a brash, divisive film by Josh Safdie about a striving table tennis player (Timothée Chalamet) in 1950s New York. The movie grossed close to $180 million worldwide, making it the biggest box-office performer in company history. A24 also earned a nomination for Rose Byrne’s performance in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” another in-your-face film, this one exploring the pressures of motherhood.
Yet the company went home empty-handed on Sunday night. What gives?
“You can say that A24 got blanked, but it’s kind of remarkable it got 10 nominations in the first place,” said Glenn Whipp, the Oscars pundit for The Los Angeles Times. “Safdie’s last movie, ‘Uncut Gems,’ received zero nominations and had people leaving theaters with panic attacks. ‘Marty Supreme’ was dialed down compared to that but it still had that kind of vibe.”
Every year, there are movies that are admired enough to land a significant number of nominations but not beloved enough to earn trophies. It has become a frequent phenomenon since the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences permanently expanded the best picture category to 10 films for the 2022 Oscars. This year, Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Bugonia,” from Focus Features, earned four nominations, including a best actress nod for Emma Stone, and walked away with zero prizes.
Although the academy’s membership has changed in the past decade, becoming younger and more international, it is still predominantly an organization dominated by older white men. Safdie’s aggressive approach to filmmaking and Chalamet’s madcap marketing may have been just too much for that group to embrace.
Chalamet was considered A24’s best chance at an Oscar win this year after landing a Golden Globe for his performance. And he campaigned hard for the prize, including agreeing to a career retrospective hosted by the American Cinematheque. That event alone may have killed his chances, pundits say.
Career retrospective? At 30?
While the academy often bestows ingénues with little gold men, it likes to make actors work longer and harder for the prize. Add in that many voters may have conflated Chalamet’s egotistic character, Marty Mauser, with the actor himself, and Michael B. Jordan — who is 39 and delivered a speech filled with humility and gratitude at the Actor Awards this month — became the easier box to check.
“Chalamet lost for the same reason Hawke and Moura and DiCaprio did — because Michael B. Jordan won,” the entertainment writer Mark Harris wrote on social media, referring to Ethan Hawke, Wagner Moura and Leonardo DiCaprio, the category’s other nominees. “Academy votes are not like internet posts: Most people vote affirmatively, because a performance thrilled or moved or delighted them. They almost never vote primarily to block someone.”
“Marty Supreme” lost the races for best picture, best director, best editing and best casting — the first new Oscars category since 2002 — to “One Battle After Another,” directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. In best actor, best original screenplay and best cinematography, it fell short to “Sinners,” by Ryan Coogler. And “Frankenstein,” by Guillermo del Toro, took home the awards for best production design and best costume design. (A24 did not respond to requests for comment.)
There is a perception that Chalamet lost because of the ire over his response to a question about audiences’ eroding attention spans: “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera,” he said, “where it’s like, ‘Hey! Keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore.’”
But although those comments made their way into one of Conan O’Brien’s first jokes at the Oscars on Sunday, they had not gained traction online until the final day of voting.
Troubling signs for Chalamet can be traced back to before the December release of “Marty Supreme,” when he began embracing his character’s obsessive, do-anything-to-win mentality. An 18-minute fake video meeting where he encouraged his A24 marketing team to embrace some radical ideas, including soaring an orange blimp around various cities, was a viral hit. He wore an orange suit to his premiere, with Kylie Jenner on his arm.
And no one had forgotten his swaggering speech from last year’s awards circuit, for his performance as Bob Dylan in “A Complete Unknown.” It was then that he proclaimed he wanted to be “one of the greats.”
“Chalamet committed a lot of unforced errors,” Whipp said. “I heard from a lot of voters who thought he was acting too big for his britches. They didn’t like his shenanigans.”
Nicole Sperling covers Hollywood and the streaming industry. She has been a reporter for more than two decades.
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