While Adrien Brody bares the depths of his soul in interviews and poses for the covers of magazines, Timothée Chalamet is pulling double duty on Saturday Night Live and making bizarrely accurate football predictions on ESPN. They’re both playing the same game — with very different strategies.
Both are Best Actor front-runners at the Oscars, with Brody in the lead, because he’s already beaten Chalamet at the Golden Globes and the Critics Choice Awards. Final voting for the Academy Awards opened on Feb. 11 amid the biggest midseason shake-up in awards history, thanks to the downfall of Emilia Pérez. Anything could happen.
Brody’s campaign is more traditional. The 51-year-old starred in The Brutalist, a 3-hour-and-35-minute beast of a film about a fictional architect who survives the Holocaust in Hungary and flees to the United States in pursuit of the American dream. In it, Brody’s character constantly faces grief and mistreatment.
Trusted news and daily delights, right in your inbox
See for yourself — The Yodel is the go-to source for daily news, entertainment and feel-good stories.
He told Yahoo Entertainment in December that he has an “intimate” understanding of the film because his mother is a Hungarian immigrant. He also delved into the significance of the role in his lengthy, high-profile features for New York Magazine and Variety, which yielded sexy yet thoughtful photoshoots. He also posed for a demure ad campaign with J.Crew. Winning so many awards has also allowed him to make acceptance speeches in which he praises his loved ones and ancestors.
Brody appeared to be the clear front-runner for the Oscar until late January, when news circulated that The Brutalist used an artificial intelligence tool in post-production to perfect minor details in Brody and Felicity Jones’s performances. The film’s editor, Dávid Jancsó, said it was “mainly just replacing letters here and there,” and its director, Brady Corbet, said, “Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own.”
Brody won the Oscar for Best Actor in 2003, when he was 29, for his role as a Holocaust survivor in The Pianist. He has picked up a few accolades over the years, but nothing as big as that, and never at the Academy Awards.
On the other hand, 29-year-old Chalamet would be the youngest Best Actor winner in history if he took home the trophy — a record previously set by Brody himself. Chalamet was nominated in the category once before, in 2018, for his lead role in Call Me by Your Name, and has played key roles in several Best Picture nominations over the years, including Little Women, Dune, Lady Bird and Don’t Look Up. None of those won, either.
Chalamet plays Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, which follows the legendary singer at a pivotal moment in his life, when he broke with tradition and embraced his own path, changing the course of American music history.
Chalamet spent five years in Dylan boot camp, learning to sing, play the guitar and harmonica and master the singer’s unique mannerisms. He didn’t really know much about him going into the project, but he’s now a proud member of “the Church of Bob.” In an interview with Yahoo Entertainment in December, Chalamet said his “greatest hope” for the film is that more people are introduced to Dylan’s music.
Since then, his campaign has taken a kooky turn. He appeared as a guest on ESPN’s College Gameday, where his guest picks performed so well that X users dubbed him “Lisan al-Gaib.” That’s a term used in the other Best Picture nomination Chalamet stars in, Dune: Part Two, to describe an all-seeing prophet.
He’s duplicated Dylan’s looks through the years on red carpets, embraced his doppelgängers from October’s look-alike contests, brought an e-bike to a film premiere, hosted and performed as a musical guest on Saturday Night Live, shared a bizarre and still-unexplained Instagram Live dance performance set to a Black Eyed Peas song, interviewed Super Bowl halftime performer Kendrick Lamar and done viral interviews with internet darlings Brittany Broski and Narduwar.
Although both Brody and Chalamet made their breakthrough as serious actors while young, those debuts came at very different times. Chalamet’s recent coming-of-age happened in the internet era, where his digital footprint adds depth to his persona. Video of him performing a rap as “Lil Timmy Tim” for his high school statistics class regularly circulates, and he’s not shy about addressing it. Brody has a social media presence with a significant following on X and Instagram, but no deeper lore online.
In contrast with the quirky Best Actor race, the competition for Best Picture is imploding. Controversial X posts from Emilia Pérez star and Best Actress nominee Karla Sofía Gascón resurfaced, resulting in a profound shake-up for the film’s front-runner status, just days after it racked up a whopping 13 nods. As a result, top critics at outlets like the Hollywood Reporter and Variety are predicting that A Complete Unknown could see a last-minute surge.
The Brutalist also has a solid chance of winning, after taking home the Golden Globe for Best Drama Motion Picture. Anora, the current Best Picture front-runner after sweeping the PGA Awards and DGA Awards, doesn’t have a Best Actor nominee to carry to victory.
It’s anyone’s race, and both Brody and Chalamet are campaigning their hardest in the way that fits with their personas: poise vs. chaos. We’ll see which vibe — and which performance — the academy favors most.
