The Oscar nominations will be announced on Thursday, and betting odds put Timothée Chalamet on the Best Actor list for his performance in Marty Supreme. His putative nomination caps months of two-pronged campaigning to viewers outside and inside the entertainment-tastemaker sphere.
In the hyperactive march to the Christmas Day launch of his table-tennis period piece, Chalamet boasted about his craft like a boxer (“It’s been like seven, eight years that I’ve been handing in really, really committed top-of-the-line performances”), collaborated with sketch comic and rapper-whisperer Druski, dropped a guest verse on U.K. rhymer EsDeeKid’s “4 Raws,” and claimed “unc” status on his 30th birthday. He ticked off the interests and affectations of the textbook millennial molded by Black culture. He was positioning himself as the nexus between dyed-in-the-wool sports and rap fans and zoomers unaware of the AAVE origins of their daily slang. It’s a move that seems to have paid dividends at the box office; Marty Supreme has become A24’s highest-grossing film to date.
Now, he cruises to the awards-season finish line shaking the theatrics. At the Golden Globes earlier this month, Chalamet wore black Timberland boots. The brand has come to signify rugged, often uncultured New York grit, its actual working-class relevance and celebration in seminal rap lyrics feeding internet snarkers’ stereotypes of city dwellers. This was Chalamet toning things down. His acceptance speech ditched the self-promotional pomp of recent weeks, as he humbly congratulated his fellow nominees and thanked his partner of three years, Kylie Jenner. He seems to crave a measure of distance from the antics that earned him a spot on the Know Your Meme page for “wigga,” charitably defined as a white guy getting overly familiar with the trappings of inner-city Blackness. His ability to weaponize a fine-tuned silliness at no cost to prestige reflects an industry where white actors enjoy greater freedom in promotion and self-expression.
