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\n Keeping pace with Hollywood\u2019s awards horserace. Sign up for the newsletter here<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n For too long, one group of actors has been cruelly locked out of Academy Awards consideration: young hot men. It seems as if every year at the Oscars, another of the Academy\u2019s old biases falls by the wayside. Genre films like Everything Everywhere All at Once<\/a>, Barbie<\/a>, and Sinners<\/a> now rack up major nominations. International contenders<\/a> regularly compete all across the ballot. More work remains to be done \u2014 infamously, there has still never been a Black Best Director winner \u2014 but it\u2019s heartening to see the definition of what, and who, is considered Oscar-worthy expand beyond the narrow confines of yore.<\/p>\n This season may bring another crack in Oscar\u2019s glass ceiling. For too long, one group of actors has been cruelly locked out of Oscars consideration, their podium moments relegated to low-rent precursors like the Golden Globes and MTV Movie Awards. That could turn around this year, when these long-overlooked performers finally get their moment in the sun. I\u2019m talking, of course, about young hunks.<\/p>\n For as long as I\u2019ve been following the Oscars, it has been conventional wisdom that young men do not win acting trophies. This is particularly true for Best Actor, where there has been only one winner younger than 30 in the entire history of the Oscars: The Pianist\u2019s Adrien Brody<\/a>, who was 29 when he won in 2003. The reasoning for this usually goes that these guys already have everything \u2014 millions of dollars, beautiful women, the full flush of youth \u2014 so the mostly male, mostly middle-aged members of the Academy prefer to make them sweat a bit before allowing them to get an Oscar, too.<\/p>\n The go-to example is Leonardo DiCaprio<\/a>, who wasn\u2019t even nominated when Titanic<\/a> pulled in 14 Oscar nods on its way to winning Best Picture and who had to wait into his 40s before he was allowed to win for The Revenant<\/a>. DiCaprio\u2019s fellow \u201990s idol Brad Pitt didn\u2019t win an acting Oscar until he was in his mid-50s, for Once Upon a Time in \u2026 Hollywood<\/a> (though by then he already had a trophy for producing 12 Years a Slave<\/a>). This decade, we\u2019ve seen Elvis\u2019s Austin Butler<\/a> lose to The Whale\u2019s Brendan Fraser<\/a> and, in a poetic irony, Brody win his second for The Brutalist<\/a> before Timoth\u00e9e Chalamet could win his first for A Complete Unknown<\/a>. And those are the guys who did get nominated. Whiplash\u2019s Miles Teller, Creed\u2019s Michael B. Jordan, 1917\u2019s George MacKay \u2014 none of them even got in the door.<\/p>\n That may be about to change. Chalamet is nominated for Best Actor again this year for Marty Supreme<\/a>, and this time he\u2019s the betting favorite to take the prize. Both the Critics Choice Awards<\/a> and the Golden Globes<\/a> tipped his way, and while industry groups like SAG<\/a> and BAFTA<\/a> could yet upend the race, given the fact that Chalamet won at SAG last year, he\u2019ll be a safe bet to repeat this year. As for BAFTA, Marty Supreme was the third-highest-grossing Best Picture contender at the U.K. box office, behind only F1<\/a> and Hamnet<\/a>, so he should have a decent shot at the win there as well.<\/p>\n Ever since an awards strategist I spoke to a few weeks ago mentioned this theory, I haven\u2019t been able to stop thinking about it.<\/p>\n How did Chalamet go from also-ran to front-runner in the span of 12 short months? Many have pointed out that the actor turned 30 back in December, thus crossing the invisible line that separates \u201cyoung whippersnapper\u201d from \u201cseasoned veteran.\u201d There may be some truth to that. Two men have won Best Actor at age 30, Richard Dreyfuss for The Goodbye Girl and Marlon Brando for On the Waterfront, though looking at the data, it\u2019s more the 32-to-34 range where age stops being a factor. That\u2019s the Daniel Day-Lewis\u2013Nicolas Cage\u2013Eddie Redmayne zone: No one would call you \u201cold,\u201d but you\u2019re not young, either.<\/p>\n However, I\u2019d venture there\u2019s another factor behind Chalamet\u2019s seemingly effortless leap to front-runner status: Timmy isn\u2019t handsome in Marty Supreme. Ever since an awards strategist I spoke to a few weeks ago mentioned this theory, I haven\u2019t been able to stop thinking about it. The Chalamet we see onscreen in Marty Supreme is not the elegant young Dauphin we saw in Call Me by Your Name or Dune, nor the brooding heartthrob<\/a> and New York playboy<\/a> we see in perfume commercials<\/a>. Besides his terrible skin and glaring unibrow, there\u2019s something a little reptilian about Marty Mauser. He feels cold-blooded somehow. There\u2019s no warmth behind those beady little eyes.<\/p>\n If you\u2019re not the kind of person who sticks around for talk-backs, you may be under the impression that this is what Chalamet actually looks like. (Even his co-star Gwyneth Paltrow<\/a> thought so.) In that case, our hypothetical Oscar voter may find themselves feeling a touch more sympathy for young Chalamet: When he\u2019s not all dolled up for the cameras, he\u2019s actually kind of a dweeb \u2026 just like me! If you are plugged-in, though, you know that Chalamet\u2019s Marty Supreme look actually required hours of labor. As makeup designer Mike Fontaine told Variety<\/a>, the transformation incorporated five separate prosthetics: \u201clarge pieces that covered his cheeks to give the acne-pockmarked skin texture \u2026 another piece on his cheekbone to create a deep scar on one side, two smaller pieces for scars under his lip, and a long scar under his chin.\u201d To sell Marty\u2019s nearsightedness, director Josh Safdie forbade the use of lensless frames. Instead, Chalamet wore contact lenses that ruined his vision, then put on real glasses to correct it.<\/p>\n As much as Chalamet has been running an unconventional version of a classic Best Actor campaign, emphasizing the strenuous effort behind his performance \u2014 he was secretly practicing Ping-Pong<\/a> for six years \u2014 it strikes me that one secret to his success is that he\u2019s also running a classic actress campaign. Because it\u2019s Best Actress that gave birth to the clich\u00e9 about pretty people uglying themselves up for an Oscar. The most famous example is Charlize Theron in Monster, in part because she was the third in a row: The two women who preceded her, Halle Berry in Monster\u2019s Ball and Nicole Kidman in The Hours, also de-glammed themselves. Recent winners like Brie Larson of Room and Michelle Yeoh of EEAAO have gone for similar, if subtler transformations, while Yeoh\u2019s co-star Jamie Lee Curtis took the same path to victory in Supporting Actress.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t think this is a conscious strategy on Chalamet\u2019s part, but, regardless, it makes a certain kind of sense. Like DiCaprio in the \u201990s, he\u2019s got the kind of fine-boned softness that scans as feminine. (Contrast with Austin Butler, the Brad to his Leo.) His prettiness takes just as much effort to tamp down as Theron\u2019s did 20 years ago \u2014 why shouldn\u2019t he reap similar rewards?<\/p>\n I think there\u2019s a third factor at play as well. As luck would have it, Chalamet isn\u2019t even the biggest dreamboat in the Oscars race this year. The honor goes to Frankenstein<\/a>\u2019s Jacob Elordi, who became the first Kissing Booth alum to be nominated for an Oscar when he made the Supporting Actor lineup. Elordi isn\u2019t working quite the same angle as Chalamet. For one, he\u2019s competing in a category that\u2019s far less averse to awarding young men. The 28-year-old Australian is only a year younger than Cuba Gooding Jr. was when he won for Jerry Maguire and Heath Ledger would have been on the night of his posthumous win for The Dark Knight. (The record was set by 20-year-old Timothy Hutton for Ordinary People, more twink than hunk.) Elordi is also less favored to win as most pundits peg Sentimental Value<\/a>\u2019s Stellan Skarsg\u00e5rd<\/a> as the one to beat in Supporting Actor. But Skarsg\u00e5rd wasn\u2019t nominated by SAG, so there\u2019s every chance that, as he did at the Critics Choice Awards, Elordi could take advantage of a split vote between One Battle After Another\u2019s Benicio del Toro and Sean Penn and win there. After that, who knows?<\/p>\n Whether he becomes a threat to take the trophy or not, Elordi has already surpassed everyone\u2019s expectations. The stakes are higher for Chalamet.<\/p>\n The six-foot-five Elordi is far more of a traditional hunk than Chalamet, and his stature has only grown with the success of Emerald Fennell<\/a>\u2019s Wuthering Heights<\/a>, which cements him as a premier box-office draw. Haters who wondered whether the adaptation would prove to be his Norbit (now what kind of idiot would say a thing like that?) must eat their words now that he\u2019s earning raves: \u201cElordi palpably sells Heathcliff\u2019s anguish,\u201d says Katie Walsh<\/a>, \u201chis heartache at Cathy\u2019s rejection, his insecurity, the cruelty he clings to as revenge.\u201d As a result, Elordi will come into final Oscar voting benefiting from what Gregg Kilday<\/a> once dubbed \u201cthe Double Exposure Effect,\u201d nominated for one project but getting just as much buzz from another.<\/p>\n As Lainey Gossip<\/a> notes, there\u2019s an appealing synchronicity between Elordi\u2019s roles as two icons of 19th-century literature since \u201cthe root cause of the monster and Heathcliff\u2019s toxicity is, basically, daddy issues.\u201d Critics might note another similarity between the two: Both characters have been stripped of much of their on-page monstrousness. This is yet another way Elordi\u2019s character stands apart. While other supporting-actor transformations, like Ledger in The Dark Knight or Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men, were turns toward the monstrous, Elordi\u2019s Frankenstein metamorphosis maintains his romantic appeal, even as he\u2019s playing a character constructed from a bunch of disassembled corpses.<\/p>\n Whether he becomes a threat to take the trophy or not, Elordi has already surpassed everyone\u2019s expectations. The stakes are higher for Chalamet, who now \u2014 like so many of his characters \u2014 is expected to make good on his youthful promise. Fortunately, the rest of the Best Actor field is made up of guys who used to be in the exact same position. Chalamet will be competing against DiCaprio, a former pinup now nominated for playing a middle-aged dad in One Battle After Another<\/a>. There\u2019s also Michael B. Jordan, who after missing out for nom-worthy performances in Creed and Black Panther finally made the cut for Sinners<\/a> \u2014 in part because, at age 39, he\u2019s the kind of established leading man the Academy has no qualms about recognizing. We should also not neglect The Secret Agent\u2019s Wagner Moura<\/a>, no slouch in the looks department himself, or Blue Moon\u2019s Ethan Hawke<\/a>, who occupied roughly the same position for Gen X as Chalamet does for Gen Z. If Chalamet ultimately triumphs, this too could be another reason: When everyone in the race is a hunk, what does a few years make?<\/p>\n Sign up for Gold Rush<\/p>\n A newsletter about the perpetual Hollywood awards race.<\/p>\n Vox Media, LLC Terms and Privacy Notice<\/p>\n
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\n Photo-Illustration: Vulture; Photos: Frederic J. Brown\/AFP via Getty Images, Samir Hussein\/WireImage\n <\/p>\n