'Taking your shirt off on the red carpet is different': Will Timothée Chalamet's wild awards campaign win him an Oscar?

After the A Complete Unknown star's surprise SAG win, viral acceptance speech and attention-grabbing campaign, could he pip Adrien Brody to the post to win the coveted best actor prize?

He turned up to his premiere on an e-bike; crashed his own lookalikes contest; laughed at all the times he failed to win awards on Saturday Night Live; and on Valentine's Day he arrived in Berlin's sub-zero temperatures bare-shouldered, in a powder pink vest. Over the course of a few weeks and months, Academy Award nominee Timothée Chalamet has upended the idea of how awards honourees behave in order to secure votes. Could he still be rewarded with a best actor Oscar on 2 March?

It would be a major upset even for this extraordinary awards season if so, as the favourite for the prize, Adrien Brody, who plays a Holocaust survivor in Brady Corbet's The Brutalist, has won the Golden Globe, Bafta and Critics Choice Awards – all traditional harbingers of the Oscar. But then 29-year-old Chalamet took the SAG (Screen Actors Guild) prize for best actor on Sunday for his role playing a young Bob Dylan in James Mangold's biopic A Complete Unknown, accepting the award with an earnest speech that went viral.

Until that moment, he was at least winning the award for "one of the most gonzo best actor campaigns in Oscar history", as Variety describes it. Apart from the e-bike incident in London and poking fun at his "loser" awards face on Saturday Night Live, he chatted with Kendrick Lamar ahead of Lamar's performance at the Superbowl half-time show, and impressed on sports channel ESPN by making accurate college football predictions. (Some were moved to label him "Lisan al-Gaib" for this, in reference to the seer-like figure from Dune: Part Two, which along with A Complete Unknown, makes two best picture nominees in which Chalamet stars.)

"What I find most interesting is everyone's reaction to it," Variety's Chief Awards Editor, Clayton Davis, tells the BBC about Chalamet's campaign. "It varies from, 'Oh my god, the guy is an artist and he's our generation's James Dean, our Marlon Brando,' to older people feeling like he's the epitome of Gen Z or TikTok."

Davis believes that Chalamet's actions (not to mention the baby pink and acid green outfits, plus his celebrity partner Kylie Jenner's discreet ) mean that he is speaking directly to his peer group – and that can only benefit the Academy Awards. "He's really speaking to Gen Z, and I would say, if anything, maybe he's going to be a great and needed lifeline to get Gen Z into the Oscars again, by consuming content differently," he says. "And the Oscars have been trying to find a way to reach that TikTok generation that's going to care about a 100-year-old organisation." 

What he has also done, Davis argues, is made an awards season campaign authentic for someone of his age.

"He's trying to redefine how it looks for someone like him, and I can appreciate that," he says. "And as someone who likes to call themselves an Oscar historian, I'm used to the traditional. You go in, you kiss babies, shake a lot of people's hands, and you talk about your work. Taking your shirt off on the red carpet is different. And it may be jarring for a lot of people at first, and it may not work this time, but it doesn't mean that it won't work ever. When you're the first to do something, it always looks strange until it becomes the norm. We are in a transitional period in Hollywood across the board. Why wouldn't that also hit the Oscar campaign trail">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });