If you follow Hollywood and the Academy Awards, you’re probably familiar with the stops a soon-to-be nominee makes on the road to the Oscars. There’s the circuit of precursor awards shows such as Golden Globes, Critics’ Choice, SAG Awards, and the BAFTAs. There are the visibility plays: late-night talk show appearances, hosting Saturday Night Live. And then there are the lesser-known but equally strategic events like the Governors Awards, the Academy Museum Gala, and the pre-ceremony luncheons where hopeful nominees mingle directly with voters.
If that sounds like a packed October-to-March schedule, that’s because it is. But for any actor hoping to see their name engraved on that gold statuette, this kind of campaigning isn’t optional; it’s essential.
Ultimately, the Academy Awards aren’t, and have never been, a measure of pure artistic merit. They’re also a system that rewards those who “play the game,” so to speak, and this year made clear just how much voters value that game.
Yes, this is partly about Timothée Chalamet’s historic fumble of what, just a few months ago, felt like a locked-in Best Actor win for his leading performance in Marty Supreme. His ultimate loss to Michael B. Jordan for “Sinners” is a perfect case study of what actually matters to Oscar voters beyond who gave the best performance.
First and foremost, the Academy is made up of industry professionals across 17 branches, including directors, actors, writers, producers, costume designers, makeup artists, production designers…basically every category that gets named during the ceremony makes up its own branch. While craft-specific winners are picked only by their own branches, everyone in the Academy casts their vote for Best Picture in a ranked voting system, where they order each nominee from best to worst, and winners are decided based on that. The winner is not necessarily the most passionately loved film, but the one with the most widespread support.
Informally, this idea applies to the acting categories as well. The performances are intrinsically tied to the film around them. Take this intriguing stat: since 2020, every Best Picture winner has had their leading lad or lady take home the acting statuette. Clearly, if voters like a film enough to reward it with Best Picture, the love extends down the ballot. This is a relatively new phenomenon — the last few years of Oscar ceremonies have seen near-historic sweeps by the night’s top winners. This year actually broke that stat, with head honchos One Battle After Another and Sinners taking home more comparable stashes of awards.
But Marty Supreme, on the other hand, won a grand total of 0 Academy Awards. Voters liked the film enough to nominate it, but the love seemed to have worn off by the time the winners were decided.
Logistically, though, this makes sense, too. The 2026 Oscar nominations came out in the middle of January. Marty Supreme, with its Christmas release, was fresh in voters’ minds. As the season progresses, ping-pong clearly fell to the wayside in favor of revolutionaries and juke joints. Other films maintained stronger momentum, and Marty Supreme simply didn’t have a grasp on voters anymore.
On the other hand, Sinners’ love only grew throughout the Oscars season. Despite coming out in April 2025, voters showered Ryan Coogler’s vampire epic with a record-breaking 16 nominations, defeating the record held by Titanic, La La Land, and All About Eve, all of which received 14. (While some chalk this up to the inclusion of a new Best Casting category, the previous record holders were nominated for two sound categories, which were later combined into one.)
It’s reasonable to say that Chalamet lost because his film simply wasn’t strong enough to carry him to a win. But this isn’t entirely realistic, either. Jessie Buckley took home Best Actress in Hamnet as the only win for her film, so there’s a possibility that the strength of her performance could transcend the surrounding project.
This is where campaigning comes into play.
To call Timothee Chalamet’s Marty Supreme campaign unconventional would be an understatement. He seemed to shirk the traditional stops expected of Oscar hopefuls in favor of big swings such as turning the Las Vegas Sphere into a ping-pong ball, flying an orange Marty Supreme blimp, and wearing matching latex outfits with his girlfriend Kylie Jenner. This worked, too: Marty Supreme earned the largest box office haul for an A24 film, which is a win in and of itself.
But the campaign didn’t stop at the box office. Chalamet continued his escapades in ways that seemed to creep further and further into unadulterated arrogance. In interviews, he implied that he would have an Oscar in the next year, that his work in Marty Supreme was “top-level shit,” and that he didn’t want anyone to take for granted the years he’s been putting in great performances. This is strange, coming from an actor who already has three Best Actor nominations at the age of 30. This doesn’t even take into account his comments about opera and ballet being obsolete, which, while prime social media fodder, came after Oscar voting closed and thus had no impact.
Perhaps Chalamet was playing a role in his press tour, mimicking the overly arrogant bravado of his character Marty Mauser. But if that was the intention, it certainly didn’t read that way, and it’s unsurprising that Academy voters, with an average age of 63, were unmoved by a 30-year-old acting like he’s well overdue for a statuette.
Contrast this with Michael B. Jordan, who took a much more traditional campaigning path. He’s brought his mother as his date to all of his award shows and seemed to make an appearance at every expected stop. Beyond that, though, Jordan has been in the industry since he was a teenager and has clearly built up a massive amount of respect and goodwill among his peers — just listen to Viola Davis screaming as she announced him the winner of the Actor Award. When a respected actor gives a great performance in a great movie, it’s a no-brainer for voters to want them to win the gold, especially if their main opponent is someone deemed a tad unlikable.
None of this is to suggest that Jordan is undeserving of the Oscar. I was thrilled when he won, and I think it’s a step in the right direction for the Academy to honor incredible horror performances. But it would be naive to suggest that no other factors were at play.
You may disagree with the principle that campaigning and visibility are as important as performance when it comes to winning an Oscar. God knows it’s annoyed me in the past when “veteran” actors win over superior performances (see: Jamie Lee Curtis in Everything Everywhere All at Once). But this is how the Oscars work, and it’s how they’ve always worked, and how they always will work.
If Timothee Chalamet is serious about wanting to win an Oscar, he’ll have to follow in the footsteps of those who came before him: keep your head down, put in the work, and don’t prattle on about being overdue. In the Hollywood ecosystem, humility, likability and strategy carry equal weight as performance and talent.