Timothée Chalamet will have to wait until at least his next supposed Sure Thing to collect his Oscar. Though the prodigious young actor was tipped early in the awards season as a near-lock for Best Actor, given his high-energy, irresistibly disagreeable performance in the fast-paced Josh Safdie film Marty Supreme, he wound up losing his third Best Actor nomination to first-time nominee (but longer-time actor) Michael B. Jordan, who won for his dual performance in Ryan Coogler’s vampire-crime-musical-drama-thriller Sinners.
Most of the time, it’s really easiest to assume that when a performance wins an Oscar, it’s because the Academy members voted for it, rather than against someone else. In other words, no one really gets Norbited, no matter how much fun it is to write about. That said, it’s possible that Chalamet’s relentless, Marty Mauser-ish, life-self-consciously-imitating-art campaign of terror-charm might have put off some voters, if they happened to be torn between two of the biggest movie stars under 40.
It’s also possible that Chalamet’s “he’s due” narrative was something of an illusion. Yes, he’s been nominated three times before turning 31, which is a major feat in a category that tends to favor veterans. But he wasn’t exactly the most-nominated actor in this group of five, either; this was also Ethan Hawke’s third acting nomination (plus two more for screenwriting), and though Leonardo DiCaprio (the Chalamet of his day) has already won, he’s also been nominated seven times (plus one for producing The Wolf of Wall Street). He didn’t get his Best Actor win, by the way, until he was over 40 — older than Jordan or Chalamet are now.
There was also just way more support for Sinners than there was for Marty Supreme. Coogler’s film had a record 16 nominations and nabbed wins for Best Original Screenplay, Best Cinematography, and Best Score; Marty Supreme wound up empty handed. (We incorrectly guessed that Sinners might win for its sound and costumes, but it wound up with victories in the more prominent categories of actor and cinematography instead!) And while Jordan hasn’t taken the lead in quite so many prestige projects as Chalamet, who is vocally aiming for a generational run, his general choosiness has assured that people haven’t gotten sick of him. He’s been starring in a movie roughly every two years or so, and not all of them bring him onto the awards campaign circuit.
Finally, there was an initially underrated degree of difficult to Jordan’s performance, which involved creating two distinctive characters without a lot of fancy makeup effects. Though this year had a surprising number of dual-role actors — Robert De Niro, Dylan O’Brien, Robert Pattinson — no one has won Best Actor for a dual performance for 60 years, which is when Lee Marvin triumphed for the Western comedy Cat Ballou. Jordan wasn’t playing his characters Smoke and Stack for laughs, though they do have some funny moments. Put together, they play romance, drama, action, and horror; it’s a hell of a lot for one movie star to do in a single picture, and Jordan earned he hell out of his award.
Jordan also became the sixth Black actor to win Best Actor, and the youngest winners since Rami Malek for Bohemian Rhapsody. Chalamet would have been the second-youngest winner of all time. But not all records were made to be broken.
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