Why the sexist, ageist Oscars won’t crown Timothée Chalamet

In Marty Supreme, Timothée Chalamet plays a table tennis virtuoso who barges his way to the top of his field on a potent cocktail of skill and self-belief. And this performance was so convincing that some of us believed the 30-year-old actor would be able to repeat it off-screen, and jostle his way to the Best Actor Oscar he’s coveted openly for years.

But life and art don’t appear to be in sync. Chalamet seems like an obvious Best Actor candidate: he’s the pre-eminent movie star of his generation, and is on his third Academy Award nomination in eight years.

Yet even after doing everything right – Marty Supreme was a critically acclaimed box-office hit, which Chalamet plugged tirelessly on the talk show and Q&A circuits – his frontrunner status has all but fizzled out. Last month, he lost the Best Actor Bafta to Britain’s own Robert Aramayo, while over the weekend it was his fellow Oscar nominee Michael B Jordan who won Outstanding Male Performance at the SAG Awards.

So what’s going wrong? It looks as if Chalamet has run afoul of a long-standing Oscar curse: he’s simply too young to win. While the Academy often honours actresses in their 20s and early 30s, it’s allergic to doing the same to the men. Across the last 97 ceremonies, the average age of a Best Actor winner is around 44-and-a-half; the average Best Actress is younger by nearly eight years.

In practice, this means that even the most admired male stars are routinely overlooked by the Academy for what will later come to be regarded as their best work. If Chalamet wants someone to commiserate with, he could do worse than his fellow nominee Leonardo DiCaprio, who only managed to win his first – and, to date, only – Oscar at 41 years old. Before then, he’d managed only four nominations, for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape (at 19), The Aviator, Blood Diamond and The Wolf of Wall Street (in his 30s): his work in Romeo + Juliet, Titanic, The Beach, Gangs of New York and Catch Me If You Can couldn’t even get him on the shortlist.

‘There’s something psychological going on’

This isn’t a statistical quirk but a cultural pattern. “There’s something psychological going on here,” believes Michael Schulman, a seasoned awards-watcher and the author of Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat and Tears. For Schulman, the bias against younger actors is “grounded in stereotypes, popular iconography and the gender politics embedded in our culture.

“We tend to think of successful men as those who have worked their way up the ladder – who have achieved their highest levels of power in their 40s or 50s when they, say, become a CEO. And as in life, so it is in Hollywood. For male actors, an Oscar can stand as recognition for their entire ascent, or just time served.”

That DiCaprio’s winning performance came in The Revenant – a blizzard-racked survival western that was sold to voters and the wider public alike as an acting endurance test – is, Schulman believes, no coincidence. “How many times did we have to read about him sleeping in an animal carcass and eating raw bison meat?” he jokes. (Both of these on-set anecdotes were planks of the 2016 DiCaprio campaign.) “Yet I don’t think today anyone regards it as his best performance.”

The pattern is unfair; it’s also entrenched. Take Dustin Hoffman: nominated in his 30s for The Graduate, Midnight Cowboy and Lenny, ignored for All the President’s Men, but only a winner at 42 for Kramer vs Kramer (and again at 51 for Rain Man). Or Al Pacino, who made the shortlist in his 30s for The Godfather parts One and Two (the former in supporting), Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and more, yet only won at 52 for Scent of a Woman.

Or, more drastic still, Paul Newman: nominated throughout his 30s, 40s and 50s for classics of the era like The Hustler and Cool Hand Luke, though it wasn’t until he was 62 that he’d eventually win for The Colour of Money – ironically, a film about old talent making way for new. The bright and thrusting next generation was embodied by a then 24-year-old Tom Cruise, who didn’t win an Oscar in his 20s, 30s, 40s or 50s either, partly because his own chief executive era has been indefinitely deferred by a lengthy action-star sabbatical. Cruise’s new film Digger, due later this year, may finally convert him into a plausible executive-tier choice in the Academy’s eyes.

For Chalamet, the curse may be even harder to escape because his career has been built on playing callow youths. When golden-age stars like Clark Gable and James Stewart won Oscars in their early 30s, it was for playing slightly dog-eared career men – both tabloid journalists, in fact – but Chalamet’s best-known roles are boyish gadabouts (Call Me By Your Name, Lady Bird) and single-track prodigies, from Marty Mauser to young versions of Willy Wonka and Bob Dylan, to Paul Atreides in Dune.

“In the industry’s eyes, he’s still a young brat,” says Schulman. “In Marty Supreme he plays cocky, but that was also originally the way he was playing ‘Guy Campaigning for Oscar’, until someone obviously advised him to tone it down.

“He’s reinventing what movie stardom and salesmanship look like for a younger audience: the stunt where he stood on top of the Las Vegas Spheredrew a lot of attention to his movie. But people in the Academy like when a degree of reverence is shown towards the whole operation, so he’s belatedly realised he couldn’t just cannonball through awards season talking like Marty Supreme. Even his dress at events has become less brash and more traditional. He’s realising he has to play by the Academy’s rules.”

The plight of middle-aged actressses

While it might seem unfair that these forces are things only male actors have to contend with, rest assured the Academy hive mind is an equal-opportunities dream squasher, and women are merely being stitched up in the opposite direction. In short, if you haven’t bagged Best Actress by 35, it’s almost certainly not happening. On a graph of Best Actor and Best Actress winners’ ages, female eligibility peaks in actresses’ mid-20s and early-30s before plummeting, while men enjoy a fairly steady ascent until their mid-40s, before their equally steady middle-aged descent begins.

This, Schulman believes, is every bit as ingrained due to cultural forces far deeper rooted than the Oscars themselves. “It’s the Cinderella myth,” he points out. “What’s more romantic than Mikey Madison ascending from nowhere to be crowned for her lead performance in Anora at 25 years old? For young men we don’t have an equivalent myth, but for young women it’s an extremely compelling one.” The impulse is almost certainly compounded by the industry’s more straightforwardly lascivious preference for hot, slender ingenues, plus an ambient awareness that great parts for women over 40 are scarce.

Says Schulman: “There’s an assumption that men will have longer, more sustained careers, so there’s no rush to recognise them for a breakthrough in their 20s. But in Hollywood, like elsewhere in life, women aren’t allowed that same trajectory.”

What they do get, however – or a small handful of them, anyway – is a second bite. Male Oscar eligibility is a bell curve, but for women there are two late blips: in the early 60s, and again in the early 70s.

Meryl Streep, Schulman suggests, is a classic example: “She won twice in her early 30s, for Kramer vs Kramer and Sophie’s Choice, but there was a decades-long stretch of only nominations until she won again at 62 for The Iron Lady.

“Those are the grande-dame roles, and once actresses enter those years, they can win again. But who knows if they’re going to get there. Not everyone can be Dame Judi Dench or Meryl Streep.”

Demi Moore discovered this only last year, when at 62, she found herself an early Best Actress favourite for her fearless performance in The Substance. Moore played a middle-aged actress whose experimental rejuvenation regime had her splitting her existence with a youthful and dewy-skinned doppelgänger. But finally on Oscar night, the Academy instead rewarded Mikey Madison, who is 37 years Moore’s junior: turns out they were Team Doppelgänger all along.

While these rules hold most of the time, there are always exceptions. One of the more notable is Frances McDormand, a winner at 39, 60 and 63 – whose career, says Schulman, “has been so unconventional that she short-circuits the logic entirely”.

But Chalamet doesn’t appear to be one. Yes, he might yet defy the odds and become the second youngest Best Actor victor in Oscar history after Adrien Brody, who won for The Pianist aged 29. If current trends continue, however, it’s likely he’ll find himself applauding one of his rivals, whose ages range from 39 to 55 – all peak (and slightly post-peak) Best Actor years. Either way, you can bet he’s already lining up a role for Christmas 2036 in which he’ll be eating wildlife and sleeping rough on a glacier, just in case.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]