Welcome to Statue Season! Each week leading up to the 98th Academy Awards ceremony, we’ll be checking in on the closest races, the winningest narratives, and the plain old movie magic that will decide who’s taking home the gold on March 15, 2026. This week, we’re assessing Timothée Chalamet’s Oscar campaign for Marty Supreme—and whether or not it can lead him to a statuette.
Awards season is in full swing: Oscar races have taken off, and stars with a statuette in their sights are making the press rounds. But no one wants an Oscar as badly as one Timothée Chalamet. You know how I know that? Because he’s basically outright admitted it—multiple times. There was his famous “I want to be one of the greats” acceptance speech at the SAG Awards last year. Then there was the Vogue profile in November where he admitted to feeling disappointed after losing the Best Actor statuette to Adrien Brody last year: “People can call me a try-hard, and they can say whatever the fuck. But I’m the one actually doing it here.” Then, earlier this month, he made perhaps his most blatant boast yet: “This is probably my best performance,” he said of his new movie, Marty Supreme, which came out on Christmas. “It’s been seven, eight years that I feel like I’ve been handing in really, really committed, top-of-the-line performances. 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 shit.”
Look, I suppose he hasn’t technically come out and said, “I would like an Oscar. Please give me one!” But what else are we supposed to gather from him calling his own filmography “top-level shit”? To give Timmy some credit, these comments aren’t coming out of nowhere. In his young career, he’s starred in a number of acclaimed films like Lady Bird, Little Women, and Dune and has nabbed two Best Actor nods for Call Me by Your Name and A Complete Unknown, already making him an Academy Awards regular by the age of 29. Anyone else whose career immediately launched them into the Oscar pool and who has been this close to a statuette multiple times probably wouldn’t be above groveling for the trophy, either.
But with Marty Supreme, which is about an aspiring ping-pong pro (who is a certified little shit) pursuing greatness at all costs, Chalamet found a way to turn his very real desires into some performance art. He’s campaigning, and campaigning hard, but in ways so indistinguishable from his cocksure turn as Marty Mauser that you can’t help but wonder if he’s still in character. He wore a paddle-shaped purse to the Marty Supreme premiere. He posted an 18-minute “marketing” meeting video in which he pitches painting the Statue of Liberty Marty’s signature orange. He brought a posse of humanoid ping-pong balls to The Tonight Show. He lightly berated a child who hasn’t seen Wonka. He rapped alongside his alleged alter ego (choice lyric: “My life is an opera, look at the Oscars / Look at the groupies, look at the movies”). Even that “top-level shit” comment, though real enough that Marty Supreme distributor A24 maybe wanted it scrubbed from the internet, sounds like something straight from director Josh Safdie’s pen. It has all resulted in a unique and persistent Academy Awards campaign that is at once quite genuine, ironically funny, shamelessly cocky, and oddly endearing—but can it actually win Chalamet an Oscar?
Chalamet’s Oscar pursuits have often turned into events in and of themselves during awards season. His campaign for A Complete Unknown last year was particularly robust: He turned ESPN’s College GameDay into a press tour stop, showed up to his own look-alike contest, and stepped in as both the host and musical guest on Saturday Night Live to perform some Bob Dylan songs in character. Plus, he’s got a penchant for fun public appearances regardless of what he’s promoting. His attendance during the Knicks’ playoff run over the summer, for example—in which he was completely clad in orange and blue while chopping it up with Spike Lee—really was just for the love of the game and didn’t coincide with any particular project of his.
With the Marty Supreme campaign, though, he’s acknowledging and poking fun at that persona he’s established over the years while also sincerely using it to chase that statuette that’s previously eluded him. That’s not to say he’s undermining the importance of the Oscars with irony—he’s made it clear that he places a lot of value on winning the Academy’s approval. And that sense of humor in his strategy could attract the younger audience that’s making Marty Mauser fancams on TikTok to the Academy Awards. His young fan base no doubt showed up at movie theaters during the holiday to purchase tickets to Marty Supreme, which beat expectations at the Christmas box office. And the Academy, which announced this month that the Oscars will stream for free on YouTube starting in 2029, would certainly welcome those new viewers.
More on ‘Marty Supreme’
That doesn’t mean Chalamet’s campaign will automatically result in an Oscar. For one, not everyone is charmed by his antics—his name has been in the tabloids with the words “arrogant” and “desperate” next to it. But there’s also a Titanic-sized elephant in the room: Chalamet’s biggest competition this season is One Battle After Another’s Leonardo DiCaprio, an actor whose career trajectory Timmy has been closely following. Leo was once the baby-faced heartthrob fresh on the scene, and he too opted for grittier and grittier roles to elevate himself to Serious Actor status. That turned him into one of the most celebrated actors of his generation, but it famously didn’t lead him to an Oscar until he was 42 and on his fifth acting nomination. (DiCaprio is incredible in One Battle, but that Oscar drought was so long that his turn in the movie might justifiably serve as his second makeup Oscar.) The Academy doesn’t often hand out the award to young men—the youngest Best Actor winner is still Brody, who won in 2003 for The Pianist, when he was 29, older than all of the 10 youngest women to win Best Actress. Chalamet just turned 30 and would be the second-youngest Best Actor winner if he takes home the statuette for Marty Supreme—the last actor under 35 to win the trophy was The Theory of Everything’s Eddie Redmayne in 2015. With Chalamet on “only” his third nomination, could he be in for the Leo treatment?
DiCaprio, however, never came close to campaigning like this. (In fact, the One Battle campaign might actually be the closest he’s come—his extremely uncharacteristic drop-in on Travis and Jason Kelce’s podcast has since somehow turned New Heights into Inside the Actors Studio.) Early in his career, DiCaprio became one of the “tight-lipped” stars Chalamet talked about in that Vogue profile—the type that Timmy used to look up to and now seeks to differentiate himself from in the name of forthrightness. Chalamet is coming up in an era in which star power directly correlates with accessibility—today, the aloofness that DiCaprio has long been known for probably wouldn’t translate to the same kind of success he achieved.
However, the Best Actor competition doesn’t end with Leo and Timmy. Both of them are excellent in their roles, but neither of their performances is really what you’d think of as a typical Best Actor turn. They are both comedy-leaning roles and are driven by suspense rather than the sweeping human drama you’d expect of an Oscar role. (Both actors cry in their movies but, you know, not in a Hamnet way.) This is where Ethan Hawke, who’s been steadily on the rise for his role in Richard Linklater’s Blue Moon, could sneak in for the win. His campaign has a lot going for it: One, he’s in prosthetics playing a real-life Hollywood figure in Blue Moon; two, he’s fantastic in the role and has received tons of acclaim; and three, he’s a beloved actor in his 50s who’s never won an Oscar before. Marty Supreme and One Battle are much more widely seen than Blue Moon, but Hawke’s campaign feels more traditionally Oscar-y than either Chalamet’s or DiCaprio’s.
The rest of the Best Actor pool is also quite stacked: There’s Sinners’ Michael B. Jordan, who turned in an impressive dual role in one of the biggest movies of the year; The Secret Agent’s Wagner Moura, who brings his grounded screen presence to almost every scene in the nearly three-hour Brazilian political thriller; Train Dreams’ Joel Edgerton, whose quiet grief made a lot of people cry; and Bugonia’s Jesse Plemons, whose wild-eyed obsessiveness spoke to the real world’s wave of conspiratorial paranoia. And there’s still plenty of time for someone else to emerge as a front-runner in the race.
What’s working in Chalamet’s favor, though, is that while the film industry and its stars have been eulogized for at least the past half decade, he’s still managed to make himself into a genuine movie star—in ways both modern and traditional. As Hollywood has been perpetually trying to revive itself after COVID and the SAG and WGA strikes shut down many productions, the Academy could be more eager to recognize young talent bringing new eyes to its industry than it was when DiCaprio was coming up. The pursuit of greatness may look a lot different now than it did for actors past, but regardless of whether Chalamet gets there in 2026, his new style of campaigning has challenged the old school of Oscar thought—and resulted in one of the most fascinating Best Actor races in years.
Stock Watch
To paraphrase one of cinema’s great stockbrokers: Nobody knows if an Oscar stock is going to go up, down, sideways, or in circles. In this section, we’ll evaluate who’s on the up-and-up and whose momentum is sputtering out as the competition across categories heats up.
Stock up: After Marty Supreme’s strong opening, Josh Safdie has the upper (fore)hand to sneak into a tight Best Director race. Avatar: Fire and Ash also remained ablaze for a second weekend atop the box office, and its Best Picture hopes haven’t been snuffed out yet. Ariana Grande’s Saturday Night Live episode was the show’s most watched of the season—might that make her a little more, ahem, popular in the Best Supporting Actress category?
Stock down: The Testament of Ann Lee opened in limited theaters on Christmas, but after the film’s weak showing in the Oscar short lists, it will take a blessing for Amanda Seyfried to nab a Best Actress nomination. With Stellan Skarsgard emerging as the Best Supporting Actor front-runner, it’s now looking like the One Battle battle between Benicio del Toro and Sean Penn will end with both of them missing out on the trophy. KPop Demon Hunters took a hit in the Best Animated Feature race as moviegoers continued to hop to Zootopia 2 last week—who knew a battle between a girl group and a bunny would get so competitive?
