Oscars 2025: Could Timothée Chalamet become the youngest lead actor winner?

Glenn Whipp | (TNS) Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES — I just saw James Mangold’s Bob Dylan-goes-electric history lesson “A Complete Unknown,” the music biopic that wears its subject’s impenetrable nature as its raison d’etre. And after reading all about star Timothée Chalamet’s commitment to becoming Dylan — performing the songs live on set, asking that he be called “Bob Dylan” on the call sheet and forbidding family and friends from visiting (but whom would they be calling on? Timothée’s not here, maaaaaan) — Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues” started playing on a loop in my head, only with different lyrics, reflecting what I had just watched and learned.

Timée’s on the soundstage

Goin’ on a rampage

Listen to that accent

They tell me that he’s hellbent

Look out kid

It’s something you did

You called him Tim

Now he’s feeling kinda grim

He’s Dylan on the call sheet

Listen to the drumbeat

Watch out for the p.a.

They’re sendin’ you back to L.A.

Is Chalamet going to be the latest actor to win an Oscar for playing a music legend, a not-always-proud tradition that goes back to James Cagney’s energetic portrayal of entertainer George M. Cohan in the 1942 film “Yankee Doodle Dandy”? Maybe. Combing through the list of winners — a record too lengthy to include in full but one that encompasses most recently Renée Zellweger playing Judy Garland in “Judy” and Rami Malek’s magnetic Freddie Mercury in “Bohemian Rhapsody” — you can easily be persuaded that this might be Chalamet’s year. Mangold directed Reese Witherspoon to an Oscar and Joaquin Phoenix to a nomination for portraying June Carter and Johnny Cash in “Walk the Line,” after all.

And, despite the best efforts of the filmmakers behind “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story,” which smartly punctured music biopic tropes and made subsequent movies in the genre (such as “A Complete Unknown”) feel a little silly, we haven’t reached the point where voters are ready to say “Enough.” Maybe that will come in 2027 when Sam Mendes plans to release four separate, interwoven movies about the members of the Beatles, each told from the perspective of a different band member. If they’re successful, will we get a sequel about the Fifth Beatle? The estate of Murray the K is waiting by the phone.

Meanwhile, barring some simple twist of fate, I don’t have to think twice about including Chalamet among the likely lead actor nominees for the 2025 Oscars. And that’s all right. He’s convincing, the best part of a pretty good movie. Who might be joining him? So glad you asked.

Last year, this category went heavy on the great-men biopics with Cillian Murphy winning for “Oppenheimer” and Colman Domingo and Bradley Cooper earning noms for playing civil rights leader Bayard Rustin and conductor Leonard Bernstein, respectively. Voters almost certainly will nominate Domingo again, this time for his performance in “Sing Sing,” a deeply moving drama about a theater program at the eponymous prison. Domingo plays an inmate serving time for a crime he says he didn’t commit, and there’s anger, hope, intelligence, pride and humor woven into his persuasive portrayal.

Murphy should be nominated again too for his performance as a decent man making the difficult decision to follow his conscience in “Small Things Like These,” a perfect adaptation of Claire Keegan’s novella that didn’t receive much of a push when it was released last month. Like Domingo, Murphy conveys so much through his eyes that you understand why their directors use a profusion of closeups. Sadly, not enough people have seen the movie to put Murphy among the nominees. But if tradition holds, he’ll still be at the Oscars to present an award.

Chalamet will turn 29 before the end of the year. If he won for “A Complete Unknown,” he’d be the youngest to take the lead actor trophy. Who currently holds that distinction? None other than Adrien Brody, who won for “The Pianist” in 2003, 22 days before his 30th birthday. Brody will be nominated again for the fierce passion he brings to “The Brutalist,” playing a Hungarian architect and Holocaust survivor who comes to the United States in search of the American Dream. A second Oscar is a distinct possibility.

But would that be fair to Ralph Fiennes, a wonderful actor who has yet to win one? Fiennes has been nominated just two times, the last coming for “The English Patient” 28 years ago. (Yes, I had to triple-check to make sure he wasn’t celebrated for his rakish turn in Wes Anderson’s “The Grand Budapest Hotel.”) Fiennes carries “Conclave” as Cardinal Lawrence, a dutiful and doubting man overseeing the vote for the next pope. You expect Fiennes to expertly convey inner turmoil, but it’s the comedic way he puts across the cardinal’s exasperation with petty men that won me over.

At least Fiennes has been nominated. Fellow Brit Daniel Craig has not but could well secure his first nod for playing a lonely expat shaken (and stirred) from mindless debauchery after he becomes obsessed with a younger man in Luca Guadagnino’s adaptation of the William S. Burroughs novella “Queer.” The movie is at times sluggish to the point of inertia, but Craig is magnificent as its world-weary, ravaged refugee. It’s the kind of go-for-broke performance that Oscar voters can’t resist.

I’d argue, though, that Craig was better, certainly a lot more fun, playing Benoit Blanc, the world’s greatest detective, in the “Knives Out” movies. Delight is always underrated at the Oscars, which is why we haven’t heard much about Glen Powell’s hilarious star turn in Richard Linklater’s “Hit Man,” easily one of the most enjoyable movies of the year. As Gary, a nerdy professor who finds his calling pretending to be a contract killer, Powell gets to do so many things in this movie — play a series of elaborate games of dress-up, be the romantic lead and depict a man duty-bound to practice what he teaches and show that humans can change.

That, my friends, is range. “Seize the identity you want for yourself,” Gary tells his students. Good advice for everyone, including a voting body that takes itself way too seriously.

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