Timothee Chalamet’s rise as one of the most admired film actors of his generation officially ended at the Academy Awards on Sunday night.
Not only did the 30-year-old “Marty Supreme” star lose his long-sought best actor Oscar to Michael B. Jordan, for “Sinners,” he became the punchline for one joke after another during the ceremony for recently saying that “no one cares” about ballet and opera, comments that made him appear to be smug, entitled and punching down on the work of other performing artists.
All during the ceremony, his more-famous girlfriend, Kylie Jenner, sat by his side, looking like she was forcing smiles. She also glanced warily at him as host Conan O’Brien declared in his opening monologue: “Security is extremely tight tonight. I’m just going to mention that. I’m told there’s a concern about attacks from both the opera and ballet communities!”
Chalamet had no choice but to laugh along and look like he, too, was having fun. But some fans wonder if his three-year relationship with Jenner is the reason that he lost the Oscar and that things may be going wrong for his once-promising career. They wonder if he’s the latest male victim of “the Kardashian curse.” That’s the idea that men who date women in the Kardashian family often face personal or professional misfortune.
On an old episode of her family’s reality TV show, “Keeping Up With the Kardashians,” Jenner herself explained the “curse,” saying “Every male figure that comes and dates a Kardashian… their life kind of just goes downhill.”
While some call it sexist to blame any woman for a man’s problematic behavior and fall from grace, a cultural critic wrote in The New York Times that it probably didn’t help Chalamet to be so “Kardashian-adjacent” during his Oscar campaign for “Marty Supreme.”
If nothing else, dating the younger sister of Kim, Kourtney and Khloe allowed Chalamet to show that he was done being one kind of male movie star — the sweet, vulnerable “emo angel” who could provide “a much-needed antidote” to the alpha-male toxicity long prevalent in Hollywood and in culture, Naveen Kumar wrote.
Instead, Chalamet came into this past season’s Oscars race with “a half-sneering swagger” that flipped his “initial appeal on its head,” Kumar added.
Chalamet’s defenders said he’s a talented actor who was channeling the arrogance and ambition of his “Marty Supreme” character, 1950s ping-pong champion Marty Mauser, to successfully promote his movie. But Kumar also said “it’s impossible not to consider the sort of smirking dude he’s become as it relates to the Kardashian cult of billionaire hyperfemininity.”
Jenner, a reality TV star and makeup mogul, is a master social media influencer, according to a recent cover story of her in Vanity Fair. For that reason, Kumar said, she could perhaps be partly to blame for her boyfriend’s “brazen thirst to harness the attention of celebrity into affirmation, only with an Academy Award instead of millions of hearts on Instagram.”
On X, someone posted a photo of Chalamet and Jenner awkwardly posing together as they arrived at the Vanity Fair party after his Oscars loss: “This is the face of a man who just realized the Kardashian curse is real!”
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On Reddit, someone also said that seeing “Timmy bite the dust kind of says it all” about the so-called Kardashian curse. “No man is immune and once entrenched with them, your career and identity are tainted,” this person said.
Others agreed that the curse “is real” but that most of the men affected — including Jenner’s ex Travis Scott, along with Kris Humphries, Lamar Odom, Scott Disick and, most notoriously, Kanye West — had issues before getting involved with Kylie, Kim, Khloe, Kourtney and Kendall.
They said the “KarJenner” women need attention to keep their brands alive, which then leads to “overexposure” and which in turns affects any of the men in their orbit. When it comes to Chalamet, the overexposure revealed what could have been true about him all along, one person said: “His giant ego and how in love he is with himself. I doubt the current bad press would reach same level as it is now if he didn’t date Kylie.”
But another person added: “He has always been an (expletive), so the whole ‘Kurse’ thing doesn’t work. Kylie’s fault here only could be inflating his ego even more (consciously or unconsciously), but again — if he is that delusional and so easily can be sucked up to, that is his problem.”
Most industry experts who cover the Academy Awards have not commented on Jenner’s impact on her boyfriend’s Oscars flame-out. For months, Chalamet was seen as the front-runner to finally take home the Oscar after previously being nominated twice before. Critics praised his “funny and infuriating and kinetic” performance, the kind that will “become his signature” and that could win him an Oscar, wrote Vulture critic Joe Reid.
But the momentum began to shift away from Chalamet in February. Suddenly, his frontrunner status began to slip away after he didn’t get the BAFTA award. A week later, Jordan surprised everyone — and received a standing ovation — when he was named the winner of the Actor Award on March 1.
Jordan also received a standing ovation on Sunday night, with Chalamet and Jenner rising from their seats to join in the applause. Industry experts doubt that Chalamet’s ballet and opera comments hurt his chances. While the comments came during a Feb. 21 “CNN and Variety Town Hall Event” with Matthew McConaughey, they probably didn’t go viral until after voting for the Oscars closed on March 5.
Still, the comments revealed something about Chalamet that movie fans had begun to pick up on during the Oscars campaign — not that he’s just ambitious to be “one of the greats,” as he said in 2025, but that he could also come off “as a bit of a jerk,” as Kumar said.
Whether or not Jenner is to blame for Chalamet coming off “as a jerk,” he still revealed during his Oscars campaign that he craves attention as much as his famous girlfriend does, and as much as others in her family do. And, by the end of the season, “people just got a little sick of Chalamet,” wrote Vulture senior writer Nate Jones.
Historically, the Academy Awards also have been reluctant to give the best actor trophy to young men, preferring to make them wait and for them to learn some “humility” first, Jones said.
When the 39-year-old Jordan received the Best Actor Award, he looked genuinely surprised and turned in “a humble, gracious” acceptance speech. Sitting “stone-faced” in the audience, Chalamet couldn’t help seeming “more princely and entitled by comparison,” Jones wrote. “When was the last time he was surprised to win something?”
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