'Taking your shirt off on the red carpet is different': Will Timothée Chalamet's wild awards campaign win him an Oscar?

After the A Complete Unknown star's surprise SAG win, viral acceptance speech and attention-grabbing campaign, could he pip Adrien Brody to the post to win the coveted best actor prize?

He turned up to his premiere on an e-bike; crashed his own lookalikes contest; laughed at all the times he failed to win awards on Saturday Night Live; and on Valentine's Day he arrived in Berlin's sub-zero temperatures bare-shouldered, in a powder pink vest. Over the course of a few weeks and months, Academy Award nominee Timothée Chalamet has upended the idea of how awards honourees behave in order to secure votes. Could he still be rewarded with a best actor Oscar on 2 March?

It would be a major upset even for this extraordinary awards season if so, as the favourite for the prize, Adrien Brody, who plays a Holocaust survivor in Brady Corbet's The Brutalist, has won the Golden Globe, Bafta and Critics Choice Awards – all traditional harbingers of the Oscar. But then 29-year-old Chalamet took the SAG (Screen Actors Guild) prize for best actor on Sunday for his role playing a young Bob Dylan in James Mangold's biopic A Complete Unknown, accepting the award with an earnest speech that went viral.

Until that moment, he was at least winning the award for "one of the most gonzo best actor campaigns in Oscar history", as Variety describes it. Apart from the e-bike incident in London and poking fun at his "loser" awards face on Saturday Night Live, he chatted with Kendrick Lamar ahead of Lamar's performance at the Superbowl half-time show, and impressed on sports channel ESPN by making accurate college football predictions. (Some were moved to label him "Lisan al-Gaib" for this, in reference to the seer-like figure from Dune: Part Two, which along with A Complete Unknown, makes two best picture nominees in which Chalamet stars.)

"What I find most interesting is everyone's reaction to it," Variety's Chief Awards Editor, Clayton Davis, tells the BBC about Chalamet's campaign. "It varies from, 'Oh my god, the guy is an artist and he's our generation's James Dean, our Marlon Brando,' to older people feeling like he's the epitome of Gen Z or TikTok."

Davis believes that Chalamet's actions (not to mention the baby pink and acid green outfits, plus his celebrity partner Kylie Jenner's discreet support) mean that he is speaking directly to his peer group – and that can only benefit the Academy Awards. "He's really speaking to Gen Z, and I would say, if anything, maybe he's going to be a great and needed lifeline to get Gen Z into the Oscars again, by consuming content differently," he says. "And the Oscars have been trying to find a way to reach that TikTok generation that's going to care about a 100-year-old organisation." 

What he has also done, Davis argues, is made an awards season campaign authentic for someone of his age.

"He's trying to redefine how it looks for someone like him, and I can appreciate that," he says. "And as someone who likes to call themselves an Oscar historian, I'm used to the traditional. You go in, you kiss babies, shake a lot of people's hands, and you talk about your work. Taking your shirt off on the red carpet is different. And it may be jarring for a lot of people at first, and it may not work this time, but it doesn't mean that it won't work ever. When you're the first to do something, it always looks strange until it becomes the norm. We are in a transitional period in Hollywood across the board. Why wouldn't that also hit the Oscar campaign trail?"

The actor's promotional appearances have impressed some Oscar watchers. A post on entertainment website Lainey Gossip praises Chalamet, describing his "current Oscar campaign-non-campaign" as "one of the best, if not the best, of all time… if he gets it, he's doing to do it not by prescription, not by sucking up to the old people."  

However, in his SAG acceptance speech (which also went viral) Chalamet aligned himself with some of the most revered actors in cinema history, naming Marlon Brando and Daniel Day-Lewis as those he looked up to.

"I know the classiest thing would be to downplay the effort that went into this role and how much this means to me, but the truth is this was five years of my life," Chalamet said. "I'm really in pursuit of greatness," he added. "I know people don't usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats. I'm inspired by the greats. I'm inspired by the greats here tonight… I want to be up there." He also called Bob Dylan "a true American hero" in the speech, and, a week earlier at the Berlin Film Festival, referred to him as "the man, the myth, the legend".

"I love how Timothée Chalamet isn't sugarcoating how badly he wants to win the Oscar during his SAG speech," wrote Buzzfeed's Spencer Althouse on X.

But the perception that the Oscar demographic is older and thus needs a certain style of wooing is rapidly shifting, Clayton Davis says. "They also added 4,000 new members in the last decade. And a lot of them are young, they're diverse, they're from different backgrounds," he explains. "The Oscars have changed. The old guard, you're never going to get them on board, although when you respect someone like Bob Dylan and recognise his contribution, that speaks to older Academy voters, and they can in turn respect him [Chalamet] as an artist.

"They already embraced the movie; in that it's nominated for eight Oscars. He introduced Bob Dylan to Gen Z, who probably had never heard of this guy before. So, I think you've got to admire at minimum that he is bridging the generational divide."

Chalamet may be the youngest ever best actor winner in SAG's three-decade history, but the SAG prize was also Chalamet's first ever major award. He was first Oscar-nominated in 2018 at the age of 22 for Luca Guadagnino's love story Call Me by Your Name, Bafta-nominated in 2019 for Felix Van Groeningen's addiction drama Beautiful Boy, and Golden Globe-nominated last year for Paul King's Wonka.

But although his filmography speaks of taste and versatility, there are some reasons why an Oscar win for him is still unlikely this year. "Voting for the Oscars closed already," Davis points out. "I was most confident that he would win the SAG partly because they tend to be more populist in their choices. What it means for the Oscar race now is harder to discern. Is it a 'too little, too late' mentality? I remember last year when Lily Gladstone won the SAG best actress the day before Oscar voting closed, and after I'd concluded that Emma Stone was going to win the Oscar. We all switched our predictions to Lily, and Emma Stone still ended up winning in the end."

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Nor are the statistics on Chalamet's side. No one who has won just the SAG best actor award has then gone on to win the Oscar. Male actors also tend to win their Academy Awards later in life – in an Oscar statistic probably not lost on either of them, Adrien Brody is still the youngest ever male best actor Oscar winner, for The Pianist in 2002 at the age of 29, the same age as Chalamet is now. (By contrast, the youngest ever best actress winner was aged 21 at the time.)

"I think that it's a barrier of entry for some people in terms of voting for him," Davis says. "Some people feel like, 'We have time, Timmy's here. Timmy's very established.' If anything, at minimum this generation's Leonardo DiCaprio, right?" he says. "There is this sense of, 'We don't have to do it now.'"

This may not be comforting to Chalamet, as DiCaprio was aged 41 when he finally got his best actor Oscar, on his fourth attempt, but Davis is prepared to predict that next year Chalamet will have another chance at the Oscar in a film he's starring in and producing: Marty Supreme, directed by Josh Safdie.   

"Timmy will be here probably next year… Marty Supreme sounds like it's going to be an amazing movie, even though we know nothing about it. He will probably do back-to-back nominations at minimum. And in a year when he played in the sequel to a sci-fi franchise and played Bob Dylan, that's a pretty killer resume for 2024," he says. "And now in 2025, he's going to be sporting a moustache in a Safdie brother movie. I'm excited to see what he's going to continue to deliver."

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