This year’s Oscars have already been decided. Ahead of Hollywood’s biggest night this Sunday, votes for this year’s winners were cast between February 26 and March 5, which means that right now ballots are being tallied from almost 10,000 Academy members. For those lucky nominees who’ve spent the last month or so on the campaign trail, there’s nothing to do now but prepare their outfits, write their speeches and start practicing their gracious loser face.
For some, they’ll also be looking back and wondering if they managed to inadvertently torpedo their own chances. If Timothée Chalamet doesn’t take home a little golden man this weekend, he’ll have to ponder whether his public comments about ballet and opera soured his reputation with voters.
It was in late February that Marty Supreme’s leading man took part in a live-streamed conversation with his Interstellar co-star Matthew McConaughey during which he mused about declining interest in cinema and commented: “I don’t want to be working in ballet or opera where it’s like, ‘Hey! Keep this thing alive, even though no one cares about this anymore.’”
It turns out, of course, that a lot of people do still care about ballet and opera. Mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, for one, called Chalamet’s comments “ineloquent and narrow minded.” It isn’t too much of a leap to imagine that a significant number of Oscar voters may count themselves as ballet and opera fans, especially those who work in overlapping fields such as costume design, production design and music.
With the furor erupting on social media around the same time that Michael B. Jordan took home the corresponding Best Actor prize at the Actor (formerly SAG) Awards, and even Saturday Night Live using the opportunity to score some points at Marty Supreme’s expense, suddenly Chalamet doesn’t look quite the frontrunner he once did.
For what it’s worth, in the context of the full interview (rather than brief social media clips) I felt Chalamet’s comments about ballet and opera were simply flippant rather than intentionally dismissive of the two venerable artforms, but it doesn’t matter what I think — I don’t get a vote.
If that seemed like a storm in social media teacup, it was even more surreal to see leading Best Actress candidate Jessie Buckley have to come out and publicly insist that she is a “lover of cats.” Buckley’s original comments, made on a podcast several months ago, centered on the fact that when she first moved in with her now-husband, one of his cats had (she claims!) pooped on her pillow and she’d eventually told her partner: “It’s me or the cats.” She’d won that round, but may have lost out by repeating the story in public. Buckley even saw it coming, saying at the time: “This is bad as well. I’m gonna get canceled.”
On Thursday, the same day Oscar voting closed, Buckley appeared on Tonight with Jimmy Fallon and tackled the issue head-on, saying: “I need to clarify something for all cat lovers in the world. I am a lover of cats. I woke up this morning to the world thinking that I really don’t love cats. It’s really weighed on me all day… I felt sick.”
She then went on to tell an anecdote about auditioning to appear in Tom Hooper’s much-maligned film adaptation of Cats. Any association with that film, which was famously so bad that Universal Pictures removed it from Oscars consideration and its own cast members James Corden and Rebel Wilson dressed up to mock it from the stage at that year’s ceremony, probably didn’t do much to help Buckley’s chances either.
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Even if some of the debate over Buckley and Chalamet’s comments feels overblown, history does suggest that off-screen controversies really can have an impact on whose hands those treasured Oscars eventually end up in. We don’t have to look too far back in the history books for examples.
Last year Emilia Perez star Karla Sofía Gascón became the first-ever openly trans individual to be nominated for an Academy Award in any acting category, and was heavily tipped to go on and win. That was until a series of controversies erupted around the actor, ranging from negative comments about rival film’s campaigns to facing accusations of racism and Islamophobia after old social media posts resurfaced. Anora star Mikey Madison — who faced her own backlash online after commenting that she didn’t feel the need for an intimacy coordinator — ultimately won the Oscar.
Narratives are important, and often out of the hands of the actors themselves. In 2023, Andrea Riseborough was delighted to find herself among the Best Actress nominees for her under-seen work in indie drama To Leslie, thanks to late-in-the day backing from a slew of high-profile supporters including Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Winslet, Charlize Theron, Amy Adams, Jennifer Aniston and Jane Fonda.
That joy was short-lived after critics online began to claim that Riseborough’s nod had come at the expense of The Woman King’s Viola Davis and Till’s Danielle Deadwyler, two Black actors who were left out of the category. Riseborough later commented that she understood where the criticism was coming from, saying: “The film industry is abhorrently unequal in terms of opportunity. I’m mindful not to speak for the experience of other people because they are better placed to speak, and I want to listen. I am grateful for the conversation because it must be had. It has deeply impacted me.” Michelle Yeoh won that year for her performance in Everything Everywhere All At Once.
A couple of decades earlier, Russell Crowe reportedly damaged his appeal with Oscar voters by getting into a heated argument with the director of the BAFTAs. Crowe, who had won Best Actor for A Beautiful Mind, was furious that his acceptance speech had not been broadcast in full.
“He’s not bruised, he’s not battered, but I’m quite sure his ears are still ringing,” Crowe told the Sydney Morning Herald about their interaction. “I have very little remorse for what I said… though possibly it was a little more passionate in the cold hard light of day than I would have liked it to have been.” A few weeks later, the Oscar went to Denzel Washington for Training Day.
Then there was the case of Mickey Rourke, who was widely fancied to win Best Actor for The Wrestler in 2009 before it started being reported that he had verbally attacked his rival Sean Penn as “average” and “homophobic.” Penn would end up having the last laugh when his performance as Harvey Milk, the first openly gay person elected to U.S. public office, won him the Oscar.
The truth is, as populations all over the world can attest, there’s very little science involved when it comes to mass democracy. That’s especially true when voters may only have a tenuous grasp of the facts. For example, it was widely reported last year that some Oscar voters declined to back Ralph Fiennes to win for Conclave because they thought he’d already won a coveted gold statue, even though he hasn’t.
The Academy Awards are among the most prestigious and high-profile prizes handed out in any discipline but that doesn’t mean they can’t still be decided on a whim. Crowe, who won Best Actor for Gladiator a year before the A Beautiful Mind incident, claimed earlier this year that he’s stopped worrying about Oscar buzz on that basis. “It’s a popularity contest now, it’s not really about quality,” he told an Australian radio station. “I don’t really seek anybody in Los Angeles’ approval, I couldn’t give a s***.”
