Around day five of debate over what Timothée Chalamet said and/or meant about opera and ballet, it started to feel like maybe the 2025-2026 Oscar season had actually lasted for the past 17 years.
Voting for the 98th annual Academy awards concluded on 5 March, but that didn’t stop the internet from throwing a bunch of attempted buzzer-beaters; an interview where Chalamet casually referred to ballet and opera as potentially endangered (and perhaps not especially relevant) art forms was actually held some weeks ago in a conversation with fellow actor Matthew McConaughey. But it was that same vote-closing on Thursday when the clip started to circulate virally online and rebuttals poured in. This was swiftly followed by counter-charges that most likely the majority of people excoriating Chalamet, campaigning for best actor in Marty Supreme, had themselves not been the ballet or opera especially recently.
At least no one asked Chalamet how he feels about the stage show Cats. Around the same time as the young actor was catching hell from a nation’s angry mob of alleged opera aficionados, another clip from earlier in the Oscar season resurfaced. In this one, best actress contender Jessie Buckley, nominated for her role as a grieving mother (and William Shakespeare’s woodsy wife) in Hamnet, discussing her supposed dislike of cats – the animal, not the show. She alluded to the latter when she subsequently claimed on a Tonight Show appearance that she was in fact a “cat lover”, which doesn’t exactly square with her joking about giving her cat-owning future husband a them-or-me ultimatum.
More to the point: why on Earth do we know any of this? And if we must know, why must it be discussed on a loop? Yes, a great deal of this fake controversy happens on social media, which has revolutionized the useless field of forming quick opinions on short video clips. But that has led to plenty of longer-form articles (like this one, in fact!) dissecting these tossed-off opinions, allowing absurdities to bleed into the real world.
Chalamet’s comments might attract attention at any time of year; he’s one of a few genuine under-40 movie stars. Buckley, however, is truly only receiving this attention because of her Oscar run. Even her unrelated new movie The Bride! has been discussed in large part as whether it would qualify as her Norbit (named for the Eddie Murphy movie, representing a poorly received embarrassment released during Oscar season that supposedly scuttles the star’s awards potential for more prestigious work – something that appears to have happened, at best, one time or, more realistically, never). Even praising something can serve as an invitation to snipe. Last week, I posted on social media that I was impressed by Leonardo DiCaprio’s low-vanity work in movies including Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Killers of the Flower Moon, and current contender One Battle After Another, lightly lamenting that he wouldn’t receive an Oscar for any of them. It broke containment, leading to plenty of responses implying that to praise DiCaprio was to cruelly deny deserved attention to Michael B Jordan (whose potential win I specifically described as “exciting”).
This probably isn’t the purely most rancorous Oscar campaign season on record; there are fewer (though not zero!) accusations that liking a particular movie indicates deep-seated racism, and there’s always going to be a limit on pure awards-related sleaze now that Harvey Weinstein has been jailed for his other, worse crimes. It may, however, be the most exhausting Oscar cycle in quite some time.
Moreover, it’s strange that a year where the two most-honored films in contention are Sinners and One Battle After Another – movies that are critically beloved, popular and quite accessible – would inspire such endless, joyless discourse. Part of it is a fluke of timing: in the early 2000s, the show moved from late March into late February, occasionally spilling over into early March. In the post-pandemic years, it’s been allowed to slide further back into the second half of March, including several of the latest-held ceremonies since 2003, when content churn wasn’t so relentless (and even back then, the season felt distended by reaching almost to the second quarter of the following year; hence that move to February). The combination of an extended Oscar season and social media’s tendency to serve as an outlet for the stress of a burning real world will naturally lead to some unhealthy fixations, where a fun distraction quickly mutates into misplaced anger overflowing from the rotten state of the world.
But the generally high quality of this year’s nominees also seems to be affecting the discourse in an unexpected way. Most Oscar seasons find some manner of villain emerging once the nominations are out. Last year, for example, the widespread bafflement many critics felt over the Academy’s embrace of Emilia Pérez was exacerbated when people found noxious social media posts from best actress nominee Karla Sofía Gascón; the synergy of bad vibes was almost too perfect. The year before, Maestro writer-director-star Bradley Cooper caught some flak for wanting that Oscar so bad. Some ultimately found the embracing sweep of Everything Everywhere All at Once a bit oppressive, and of course the retrograde clumsiness of Green Book made for a perfect Oscar villain. Often these beefs are outsized but ultimately understandable. Even the bizarre 2016-era frothing that La La Land, by virtue of starring two white people and being released in close proximity to the movie Moonlight, was essentially an expression of Donald Trump-style nationalism was, if not at all reasonable, at least an outgrowth of support for a small-scale indie taking on a splashy Hollywood musical (even if La La Land’s budget and scope was modest by the standards of a big studio, which it did not actually come from).
Now, faced with a crop of nominees that by most standards lack an embarrassment as glaring as Green Book, a lot of movie people seem to be spoiling for a fight anyway. Some of this comes from the online fandom of Sinners; these days you don’t get to be a cultural phenomenon (which Ryan Coogler’s period vampire drama most definitely is) without attracting hardcore fans who perceive anything less than total domination as insufficient deference, representative of society’s greater ills. In other words, liking another movie more than Sinners is oppressive. Call it the Swift effect.
But it’s not just Sinners stans contributing to a feeling of exhausting toxicity. I’ve been baffled to see some of my critic colleagues snarking or sniffing about movies such as Hamnet, Frankenstein and Train Dreams, attempting to create the sense that these are, in fact, colossal mistakes on par with the worst Oscar movies of years past. Obviously, everyone is entitled to their opinion, but the lining up of those three movies in particular for the firing squad (especially when the expensive vanity of F1 is right there!) feels like some arch Letterboxd-leftist code I can’t crack; I’m just supposed to know that this stuff is apparently awful. (Train Dreams in particular hasn’t inspired many impressively thorough cases against it so much as a lot of back-of-the-classroom disaffection after the fact.) You guys are really mad at the raw volume of Buckley’s simulated grief? Or Guillermo del Toro making the lavish Frankenstein adaptation of his dreams? Is not being mad about the Oscars an option?
In another week, it will be; it’s hard to imagine much lasting fury over the likely victory of either One Battle After Another or Sinners (the latter’s fandom notwithstanding). Either one would be a top-tier best picture selection, and how unusual that they both come from not just a big studio, but the same big studio – Warner Bros, which plans to merge with Paramount. That studio’s Oscar nomination count for this year? Zero. Don’t expect more of Coogler or Paul Thomas Anderson doing whatever they want under David Ellison’s Paramount; the weirdest thing about this year’s endless Oscar discourse is how it fails to acknowledge how much worse the awards might look in a few years. In that sense, Chalamet isn’t wrong. In a few years, an Oscar-winning, critically beloved box office hit from a major studio might look more like an acclaimed ballet performance than a full-scale cultural phenomenon.
#Academy #wars #seasons #Oscars #discourse #toxic #Oscars
