A Complete Unknown’s best actor nominee might lose out on the prize to The Brutalist favorite Adrien Brody but his journey to the stage has been award-worthy.
On Sunday, Timothée Chalamet could become, at 29 years, two months and three days, the youngest best actor winner in Oscar history. But whether or not his performance as Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown beats out presumed frontrunner Adrien Brody – the current youngest best actor, at 29 years, 11 months and nine days in 2003 – Chalamet has already won arguably the most important prize of modern movie stardom: the hearts and minds of the internet.
If we’re in the business of giving out awards for deserving, boundary-pushing work, then Chalamet’s best actor campaign – unofficial and often unspoken efforts to sway awards voters and build public sentiment – deserves its own Oscar. For the past several months, ostensibly in support of A Complete Unknown but seemingly just as much for laughs, Chalamet has embarked on a rare press run of consistent wins that generated viral moments and appealed to the reference-averse, absurdist sensibilities of his generation, bucking the usually staid methods of Hollywood promotion. Whereas past best actor hopefuls have erred on the side of grateful, serious and dutiful to the self-importance of the boomer-skewing Academy, Chalamet has worn kitschy outfits to red carpet events, treated social media like an ironic art experiment and made the rounds with influencers. In other words, though Chalamet is technically a millennial (born in 1995), we are witnessing the first genZ Oscar campaign.
