With the 2026 Oscars looming this weekend, the nominee that’s hit the headlines most in recent days is Timothée Chalamet – and for all the wrong, Academy Award-losing reasons.
But even pre-opera gate, I was confident this year would not see Chalamet breathlessly clutching his first statuette on stage in Hollywood’s Dolby Theatre for his unequivocally brilliant performance in Marty Supreme.
Yes, it’s another Timothée Chalamet think piece in the run-up to showbiz’s biggest night of the year – groundbreaking.
But I’m not here to discuss (again) his spectacularly ill-advised diss towards opera and ballet as ‘dying arts’, which even he realised perhaps went too far by admitting immediately afterwards: ‘I just took shots for no reason.’
While that could have been enough to tank an otherwise-flawless Oscar campaign – everyone from Andrea Bocelli to Juliette Binoche has weighed in with a response – Chalamet was fortunate that the conversation didn’t go viral until two days after the final Oscars voting deadline.
So he could already have been locked in as the victor – if I thought he would win in the first place.
His press tour for Marty Supreme stretched over an entire year, from the moment he accepted his Actor Award last February for playing Bob Dylan in A Compete Unknown and told the audience of assembled peers that he was ‘in pursuit of greatness’, a major theme of his current Josh Safdie-directed movie.
But as the release of Marty Supreme inched closer, the tactics became more aggressive and polarising, from embracing his own internet mythology to collab with a rapper, to a spoof Zoom call with the marketing team where he pitched raining down orange ping-pong balls from a fleet of blimps in the sky and changing the Statue of Liberty from green to a Marty-branded orange.
The joke didn’t land with everyone, but later there was no hint of humour when Chalamet told journalist Margaret Gardiner, in a since quietly deleted junket interview, that Marty Supreme contained his best performance from an eight-year period where he’d been turning in ‘really, really committed, top-of-the-line performances’.
‘And it’s important to say it out loud because the discipline and the work ethic I’m bringing to these things – I don’t want people to take it for granted. I don’t want to take it for granted. This is really some top-level s**t,’ he added, modestly.
Some voters will have been turned off by the 30-year-old’s hunger to win, which has seen him leave humility by the door a few times in the past 12 months, but it’s not even down to that.
In January he technically became a major contender to win the best actor Oscar after triumphing against Leonardo DiCaprio at the Golden Globes; he can also count Michael B. Jordan (Sinners), Ethan Hawke (Blue Moon) and Wagner Moura (The Secret Agent) as competition in his category on Sunday.
But even that didn’t see me consider him a favourite because he’s seemingly been teed up as the next generation’s Leonardo DiCaprio in terms of early mainstream success and acclaim at a young age, including Oscar nominations – but will likely have to wait years until the Academy members decide it’s his time to shine and win.
This is a comparison that’s been doing the rounds since 2018 when Call Me By Your Name’s producer Rodrigo Teixeira namechecked DiCaprio while calling Chalamet ‘one of the best actors in the world’.
But if only winning an Oscar was as simple as that.
Chalamet appears to have been doomed by his early success, just like DiCaprio, and the assumption that there’s always next time for him to win: He’s managed three acting Oscar nominations (and a producing nod) by the age of 30, with previous recognition in 2018 and 2025 for Call Me By Your Name and A Complete Unknown.
The trajectory of his career is very similar to DiCaprio’s, following the indie to blockbuster pipeline of success with ease, from Miss Stevens to Lady Bird and Little Women to Wonka and the Dune franchise. DiCaprio was springboarded to colossal fame as a youngster from This Boy’s Life and What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (first Oscar nomination at 19) by the one-two punch of Romeo + Juliet and Titanic in 1996 and the following year.
Jack Dawson’s devotion to Rose, and his refusal to float on that door with her, saw DiCaprio’s fan adoration go through the roof with the advent of Leomania in millennials in a very similar way to Chalamania taking hold among Gen Z 20 years later.
The two have even co-starred in 2021 Netflix satire Don’t Look Up, when DiCaprio famously advised Chalamet – who identified him as one of his idols – ‘no hard drugs and no superhero movies’. And now they find themselves in the same best actor category thanks to DiCaprio’s reliably excellent turn in One Battle After Another, having both established themselves as consistent presence in awards conversations in recent years.
DiCaprio is a seven-time acting Oscar nominee (and also picked up a nod as a producer on The Wolf of Wall Street) but had to wait until his fifth nomination to win, which was for The Revenant in 2016, aged 41. It’s so far his only win, with Academy voters historically failing to be won over by younger male actors; Adrien Brody remains the youngest best actor Oscar winner for The Pianist aged 29 in 2003, the only man in his 20s, while Marlee Matlin was 21 when she won best actress for Children of a Lesser God in 1987 – and there are many other best actress winners in their 20s (Jennifer Lawrence, Mikey Madison, Audrey Hepburn).
As tends to happen, many would argue this was not the performance DiCaprio ‘should’ have won for, but over two decades on from his first nomination, it was certainly (finally) his time. In the same way, many expect his One Battle director Paul Thomas Anderson to win in his category this year, after being nominated 14 times as a director, producer and writer but without a single win so far.
Meryl Streep, a 21-time Oscar nominee, only has three wins to her name – and one of those was for The Iron Lady in 2012. So much more goes into getting your hands on an Academy Award than simply giving a great performance, as Chalamet is about to find out.
‘At the start of the year, Timothee Chalamet was one of the shortest priced favourites across all categories for the Oscars, but his odds have drifted like a barge with Michael B. Jordan now the favourite for the gong,’ Coral’s John Hill told Metro.
Jordan is currently the odds-on favourite at 4/6, but Hill says it’s still ‘a two-horse race’ between the Sinners star and Chalamet, now in second place with odds of 6/4 compared to 1/5 just three weeks ago.
Ladbrokes’ Alex Apati agrees on Jordan’s odds, which were as big as 25/1 earlier this year, but puts Chalamet at a closer 11/8 in second place.
However with odds at 14/1, ‘DiCaprio has drifted massively, making it at best a two-horse race, but very much Jordan’s to lose’.
Not only is Sinners the most-nominated film in Academy Awards’ history with 16, but Jordan also clinched a pivotal Actor Award earlier this month for his performance as twins Smoke and Stack in the vampire period horror. This is traditonally seen as a good indicator of the Oscar winner, especially when this year’s Bafta best actor winner was Robert Aramayo for I Swear, a film not eligible for this year’s Academy Awards, and Chalamet and Wagner Moura were both awarded by the Golden Globes thanks to their dual acting cateegories.
Of course we’ll all discover Chalamet’s Oscars fate come Sunday, but I predict he’ll find himself in good company among his idol and former co-star DiCaprio as an also-ran in the 2026 best actor race.
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