This year’s Oscars statues were doled out earlier this week, and most of them found their way to deserving hands. There were a lot of great winners this year among a lot of great nominees, so there isn’t really anything major to complain about (depending on the fervor of your Stan Wars allegiance to Sinners or One Battle After Another). Personally, I enjoy the annual ritual of the ceremony, which provides one of the few remaining incentives for mainstream studios & audiences to pay attention to Real Movies for a few months before the marketing machine defaults back to Summer Blockbuster season. The secret to enjoying the ritual is to celebrate the instances where the awards happen to go to good movies, without fixating on the awards not going to your favorites. Getting hung up on Oscar snubs & losses is a quick path to madness, only advisable if your favorite pastime is getting mad, not watching movies. That said, I was amused by one particular Oscars “loss” this year, in the Best Lead Actor category. A couple months ago, the narrative was that Timothée Chalamet was a lock to win for his starring role in Marty Supreme, but the tide quickly shifted at the last minute to favor Michael B. Jordan instead, who ultimately won the statue for playing twin brothers in Sinners. It was a late-breaking upset widely celebrated for both its winner and its “loser,” since Chalamet had quickly become The Villain of this Oscars season, while Jordan is by all accounts a total mensch. Chalamet seemingly earned that 2026 Oscar Villain designation (despite having heavy competition in actual-villain Sean Penn) by allowing the youthful narcissistic brashness of his Marty Supreme character to bleed over into his real-life press circuit persona, turning off onlookers by playing a deviously ambitious brat for the cameras. None of this matters in any meaningful way, but it is funny how many of the jokes made during the ceremony were at Chalamet’s expense, and the crowd seemed ready to line up and take turns spanking his pasty behind with ping-pong paddles for the transgression of believing his own hype. It was even funnier watching him have to politely smile through it all, so we wouldn’t add “spoil sport” to his growing list of supposed offenses (alongside “ballet & opera hater” and “all-around fuckboy”).

All of this baseless speculation about Oscar narratives, Oscar villains, and dirty behind-the-scenes Oscar campaigns can feel like a decidedly modern phenomenon, specific to online discourse in a post-Weinstein movie industry. As evidenced by the 1966 industry melodrama The Oscar, however, those unseemly aspects of the Oscars season have been part of the ritual for over half a century now. Stephen Boyd stars as the dastardly Frankie Fane, a New York City gangster turned big-shot Hollywood actor, wholly made up for the source-material novel. The film starts at a 1960s Academy Awards ceremony where Frankie is expected to win for Best Lead Actor, despite being the obvious Villain of that season. We then flash back to his earlier years as a ruffian hustler on the opposite coast, making chump change as a carnival-barker promoter for his stripper girlfriend. In its first act, The Oscar operates mostly as a scumbag noir, characterizing Frankie as the kind of fast-talking tough guy sociopath James Cagney used to play several decades earlier. Then, it shifts into macho melodrama once Frankie is “discovered” by Hollywood types while threatening unsuspecting stage actors with a knife, seeing in him a sexy volatility that had made stars out of character actors like James Dean & Marlon Brando. Once Frankie goes to Hollywood, the movie becomes an All About Eve knockoff for meatheads, satisfying male audiences’ repressed desire for juicy gossip while distracting them with brutish delights like switchblades, bikini babes, strip shows, and fist fights. Frankie learns no lessons along the way. He burns every bridge he crosses, hustling his way to the very top in a series of professional backstabbing maneuvers, then works the press into crafting a pre-packaged Oscar narrative sure to win him the Best Lead Actor statue. In his own devious words, “I can’t rig the votes, but I can rig the emotions of the voters,” which still rings true to how most Oscars are “won” today. Only, Frankie has set himself up to be publicly humiliated by the end, since his fate lies in the hands of “a black-tied jury of his peers,” in an industry exclusively populated by people who hate his guts. He’s an asshole, everyone knows he’s an asshole, and it’s hard to pity an asshole.

It’s amusing to see a movie take the absurd pageantry of The Oscars so seriously, as if the stakes were life or death instead of the size of a nominated actor’s paycheck for their next role. The Oscar literally rolls out the red carpet to sell the prestige & grandeur of the event, going as far as to brag in its opening credits that it borrowed actual Oscar statues from The Academy instead of using props, treating them like celebrity guests. Legendary costume designer Edith Head also gets Celebrity Guest Star billing in the opening credits, appearing in a wordless cameo as herself in multiple scenes in the third act (alongside other infamous Hollywood Types like gossip columnist Hedda Hopper & 19-time Oscar host Bob Hope). Head, of course, also gets her more typical “Gowns by” credit, alongside a “Furs by” credit for famed furrier Frank Somper, which is how you know this is a classy affair. The recent Kino Lorber scan boasts some gorgeously garish color saturation, which again heightens the pageantry of this paperback novel adaptation miles above its station. The first half of the runtime is a go-nowhere crime story mostly consisting of sweaty men throwing punches to a swanky jazz soundtrack; the second half is a fish-out-of-water melodrama about a New York City street tough who can’t adjust his brash machismo to the more genteel schmoozing of the California cocktail set. Neither of those modes are especially compelling on their own, but they combine for an amusingly overwrought character study of The Oscar Villain as an archetype. Here we have a knuckle-dragging meathead with no sense of social tact, who can only get by on his movie-star handsome looks for so long before no one in his industry can stand to work with him any longer. By the time his rancid reputation catches up with him, he’s seething in his theatre chair on live TV while pretending to applaud a professional rival. He is a broken man at the rock-bottom end of an existential crisis, like Burt Lancaster at the end of The Swimmer, except the only tangible fallout of his humiliation is that he’ll have to pivot from movies to TV. I doubt that absurd scenario shares much resemblance to Timothée Chalamet’s brief, superficial arc as this year’s Oscars Villain, but it is funny to think about as the melodramatic extreme of that movie-industry cliché.

-Brandon Ledet