Oscar Seasoning: Can Michael B. Jordan Beat Timothee Chalamet?

In the battle of Sinners versus Marty Supreme, the lead actors are hungry for gold.

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Going into the Actor Awards (formerly the SAG Awards, and no, I don’t know why they changed their name either), it was assumed that Timothee Chalamet would win Best Actor for Marty Supreme. Sure, he had lost the BAFTA to Robert Aramayo, but that was a British group awarding one of their own, and Timmy was still the perceived frontrunner for the Oscars. Plus, he’d won the award last year in a shock choice over the eventual Best Actor victor, Adrien Brody (they knew his speech was going to suck and decided to skip it, I imagine.) Leonardo DiCaprio stopped feeling like a potential spoiler a while back, so who was going to stop Chalamet? Well, Michael B. Jordan.

The Sinners lead won Best Actor, delighting the crowd and especially Viola Davis, who was handing out the trophy. He gave a great speech and helped to lead the night for the movie, which won the Best Ensemble award over One Battle After Another. Suddenly, we had a real race on our hands. This is a season with few locked-in wins leading up to Oscar night, but Best Actor wasn’t expected to be all that surprising. Now, it’s Timmy versus Michael. Sinners Supreme. Ping pong vampires! And I am hyped as all hell.

I’ve seen some people claiming that Chalamet is losing steam because he’s perceived to be arrogant and presumptuous about his greatness. I get that, but I also don’t entirely buy the argument. Sure, he’s candid about his ambition and his speeches are kind of long-winded, but he’s also been told for years that he’s one of his generation’s greatest talents by people within his own industry. You can’t blame him for buying into his own hype because it’s pretty deafening. He has been a bit more irritating than usual in interviews, but never confuse online responses for those of the industry. Many of these people, blessedly, have no idea what social media is. I envy that.

No, I think Marty Supreme is the problem more than Timmy. It’s acclaimed, yes, but it’s also surrounded in controversy following headlines over the Safdie brothers’ split and alleged on-set abuses. One of its stars is a Trump-supporting asshole. Plus, it’s a heavy, anxiety-inducing film about gross people being egomaniacs. It’s very good at achieving its agenda, which is why it has so many nominations, but in a year as stacked as this one, where the competition is so strong and there’s a lot of passion behind other nominees, I wonder if Marty Supreme’s fanbase is just not as large or enthusiastic as, say, One Battle After Another’s. the Academy often defaults to voting for what it enjoyed the most, and in terms of pure screen pleasure, OBAA and Sinners have it beat.

And Sinners is a total effing blast. It’s a tightrope walk of themes and genres, tied together with impeccable craft and sheer visceral pleasure. And it works in large part because Michael B. Jordan is holding it all together. If Best Actor is decided by difficulty level, which it too often is, Jordan is dealing with some S-tier hard sh*t. Playing identical twins? But making them distinctive personas? And having chemistry with himself? That’s sort of ridiculous. The relationship Jordan has built up with Ryan Coogler has led to this collaboration, where both men are pushing one another to do more. I’d also argue that Coogler is more the face of the Sinners campaign than Jordan, whereas Timmy IS Marty Supreme. Promoting the film and its awards bets has been a real ensemble effort, with all the major players getting their dues. It’s savvy for the movie and Jordan, with the latter hardly being ignored but showing his team player power.

For all the talk of the Academy finally rallying behind a younger man for the Best Actor trophy, let’s not forget that Jordan, who is 39, also qualifies in that regard. Plus, like Chalamet, he’s proven himself to be both a commercial and critical safe bet. He’s moulding himself after the leading men that Hollywood desperately wants more of, like DiCaprio and Denzel Washington, and he’s making moves to establish himself as an above-the-line icon. Jordan’s also directing and producing now, with a remake of The Thomas Crown Affair on the way. I wouldn’t bet against him in the future.

The SAG win helps to shape our predictions because the actors branch of the Academy is the biggest voting bloc in AMPAS. It holds huge sway over the predictions (which is one reason that Sean Penn has emerged as the new Supporting Actor frontrunner, which I have feelings on.) They’re not infallible, of course, but that show of passion for Sinners and Jordan shouldn’t be discounted. Maybe the directors’ branch is super anti-Sinners but I doubt it. I have a nagging feeling that Sinners could perform far better than many are expecting. That just seems more welcome than the alternative, where it pulls a Color Purple and goes home empty-handed.

This is Chalamet’s third Oscar nomination and Jordan’s first. That might sway voters to the former. But Sinners’ huge presence may impact ballots too. Either choice would be worthy, I believe. Personally, if I was voting for Best Actor, my choice would still be my beloved Wagner Moura, but I can’t claim not to be excited by the possibility of an MBJ win. This is not knock against Chamalet, who I still think is, on paper, the frontrunner. He gave a great performance and has nothing to prove. If he wins or loses, it won’t diminish his ambition or skills (but it might get some people to calm the eff down about him for a bit.) A Jordan win would simply be incredibly satisfying, the victory people wanted for months but were told would never happen. Such has been the story with Sinners for a while: oh yeah, it’s amazing and now it’s the most Oscar-nominated film of all time, but it’s not going to win any of the big ones, right? Why not? Why write it off so quickly? Is it the racism? It’s probably the racism. That and the enthusiasm for Paul Thomas Anderson finally getting his moment after over two decades of being one of the best to do it.

I can’t help but root for the genre movie to take it, if only to see a f*cking vampire musical go down in history. But neither Jordan nor Chalamet would be “traditional” Best Actor wins, which I think is worth celebrating too. Either win would be the Academy crowning a future movie-star with a bright future and many inevitable extra noms in the coming decades. Both should keep speeches in their pockets just in case.