I Hate To Be 'That Person,' But Timothée Chalamet Should've Won The Best Actor Oscar

If there's one thing you need to know about me, it's that I love hating on music biopics. To me, they all just feel like "Walk Hard" without jokes, and I find the genre exhausting; it also feels relevant to say here that "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping," another pitch-perfect parody of music biopics, is one of my favorite movies of all time. I also think actors should, for the most part, stop winning Oscars for doing extended impressions of people who already exist, because I think creating a character from whole cloth is way more interesting than just doing, like, a really long "Saturday Night Live" bit. That's why I cannot believe what I'm about to write, which is ... Timothée Chalamet should have won the Oscar for playing a young Bob Dylan in "A Complete Unknown."

I'm shocked by my own opinion on this, but I'm going to go right ahead and purchase a grave plot on this hill because I will be dying on it. Adrien Brody ended up taking home his second Oscar (after a 22 year gap) for his starring turn as troubled architect and Holocaust survivor László Tóth in Brady Corbet's "The Brutalist," and plenty of people can and will argue that he deserved the award. (He also, as it happens, delivered a speech that felt almost as long as "The Brutalist.") But I don't agree! Should have been Chalamet!

I should also make another thing clear, which is that I really didn't like "A Complete Unknown." The fact that the conflict of the film was "guy wants to play different kind of guitar" made me question my grasp on reality, and again, I do not like music biopics. James Mangold also directed "Walk the Line," a film I find dull and unlikable from start to finish, and he sort of did the same thing all over again here. But Timothée Chalamet's performance as a young Bob Dylan is one of the two reasons that "A Complete Unknown" is even watchable. (The other reason is Monica Barbaro's scene-stealing turn as Joan Baez.)

People will argue that Adrien Brody disappeared into the role of László Tóth in "The Brutalist," but I would actually make the argument that Chalamet does the same thing in "A Complete Unknown." Even though I'd also argue that Chalamet's performance in "Dune: Part Two" might be even better than the one he delivers in "A Complete Unknown," which may undermine everything I'm doing here, I do think his take on Bob Dylan is transformative, and he's been extremely open about the fact that he worked very, very hard to pull it off. When he pulled an upset before the Oscars and won the Screen Actors Guild Award over Brody, Chalamet delivered an incredibly earnest speech about how he spent a whopping five years perfecting this performance and hopes to be one of the greats someday, and I do believe he'll be ranked among them sooner rather than later. It would have been really great for the Academy to pass the torch to Chalamet and anoint him officially for "A Complete Unknown," but unfortunately, he's going to have to wait — because of a weird, unspoken Oscars tradition.

If you're a longtime Oscars viewer like me, you may have noticed a trend that marks a divide between the male and female winners. Typically, the Best Actress winners take home trophies earlier in their careers during their "ingenue" eras; Mikey Madison's win for "Anora" continued this tradition when she beat the presumptive frontrunner in the category, Demi Moore (who won many of the precursor awards for her incredibly bold performance in "The Substance"). You can point to other winners like Brie Larson, Jennifer Lawrence, and two-time winner Emma Stone if you want to track this trend a little more closely. Conversely, men win later in their careers. Leonardo DiCaprio famously had to wait a very long time until he finally won an award for "The Revenant" despite delivering a whole host of worthy (perhaps worthier!) performances before he chowed down on a bison liver onscreen.

With this in mind, Timothée Chalamet may have to wait quite some time to become, as he put it, "one of the greats." The guy was born in 1995, making him just 29 years old as of this writing. He may even have to sit and clap for other winners for a full decade before he finally gets an Oscar of his own. Personally, I hope he doesn't have to eat any animal livers, because nobody should have to endure that nonsense again, but the point is this: Like DiCaprio before him, Chalamet very well might lose out for very deserving performances, and it already happened once when he lost the award for "A Complete Unknown." (Also, I hope Club Chalamet is holding up okay today.)

I spoke about this race and last night's Oscars ceremony as a whole on today's episode of the /Film Daily podcast:

You can subscribe to /Film Daily on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts, and send your feedback, questions, comments, concerns, and mailbag topics to us at bpearson@slashfilm.com. Please leave your name and general geographic location in case we mention your e-mail on the air.