The New York Times’s Kyle Buchanan had an interesting piece this week about Timothee Chalamet’s Oscar chances for Marty Supreme: “Can Timothee Chalamet Break This Oscar Curse?” There are several big Oscar curses, including the well-known curse of “the Best Actress winner’s marriage usually falls apart within a few years,” although that curse has not been as potent in the past decade. But there’s also an Oscar curse for the Best Actor category, namely that no man younger than 29 has ever won the Best Actor Oscar. The two youngest Best Actor winners in the entire Oscar history were Adrien Brody (29) and Richard Dreyfuss (30). Chalamet just turned 30 on December 27, and if and when he gets nominated for Marty Supreme, it will be his third Best Actor Oscar nomination by the age of 30. From the NY Times:
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.
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.)
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?
Buchanan goes on to suggest that the Academy is actually trying to appeal more to men, as in, they want the young-male demographic to watch the Oscars, and maybe the way to achieve that is by nominating and awarding younger men. Which I don’t exactly agree with – it would be much smarter to lean into the existing audience for the Oscars: women and the LGBTQ community. Make it even more fun for THEM. And if you look at that way, yes, bring on Chalamet and Jacob Elordi and Michael B. Jordan and all of the good-looking and talented actors under the age of 40. Incidentally, Jordan’s lack of nominations has more to do with his race than his age, that much has been abundantly clear since Fruitvale Station (I’m still mad that he didn’t get nominated for that film). As for Timmy’s chances… I don’t even know. If he doesn’t end up winning, I think it will be less to do with his age and more to do with HOW he campaigned.
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.
