Why Michael B. Jordan Has Quietly Overtaken Timothée Chalamet In The Oscar Race

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Each year, awards watchers file their Oscars predictions as actors slog through awards season in the hope of taking home a coveted trophy. Typically, Oscar predictions centre on the Best Actor and Best Actress nod, famous for emotional speeches and controversial moments, and this year, Timothée Chalamet has been considered the frontrunner for Marty Supreme. That is, until now. With the Oscars just five days away, betting markets have flipped. Depending on betting markets and industry websites like Gold Derby, Michael B. Jordan is between 49% and 68.4% to win for Sinners, and Timothée Chalamet is between 42% and 18.4%. And the sudden turn is not all about Chalamet’s attitude to ballet and opera.

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Timothée Chalamet has been well-positioned to win for his portrayal of frenetic egomaniac Marty Mauser in Josh Safdie’s two-and-a-half-hour ping pong epic Marty Supreme. His eagerness to win the Oscar is well-documented, and this award season he swept the Golden Globes and Critics’ Choice awards. At 30, he holds the record of being the youngest actor ever to receive three Best Actor Oscar nominations.

But at the last minute, the award seems to have slipped from his grasp — with Michael B. Jordan, nominated for playing twin brothers Smoke and Stack in Sinners, gaining momentum.

Interestingly, it’s not about the enormous backlash that Chalamet faced following his comments that “nobody cares” about ballet and opera. While his CNN/Variety town hall took place in February, Vanity Fair has noted that the specific comments about ballet and opera surfaced only days after voting for the Academy Awards closed in early March, so they won’t influence the result. But, there’s plenty else that will.

We’re breaking down the predictions:

Oscar’s 2026 Predictions At A Glance: Michael B. Jordan & Timothée Chalamet

Michael B. Jordan’s Actor Award (SAG) :

Michael B. Jordan won the Actor Award for Best Actor for Sinners — a vampire horror set in 1930s Mississippi that follows twin brothers who return home after WWI, open a juke joint, and find themselves confronted by a supernatural evil rooted in the racism of the Jim Crow South. It was a genuine upset: Jordan himself said “I wasn’t expecting this at all” during his speech. Most had expected Chalamet to continue his clean sweep.

You might think Chalamet would be happy with the more famous Golden Globe, but the Actor Award voting body overlaps significantly with the Academy’s; it could be seen as a blow to his Oscars hopes.

Box Office: Marty Supreme v Sinners

In early February, Deadline reported that Marty Supreme had cracked A24’s highest-grossing film ever, clocking around $162 million worldwide and surpassing Everything Everywhere All at Once. While the film had yet to enter the Chinese market, it had done impressive numbers for a 150 miute film about a ping pong playing narcissist, it had hardly blown Sinners out of the water, which took in $369 million globally during its run.

Some have also commented that the success of Marty Supreme and Chalamet’s marketing campaign has been overhyped, with its noise drowning out Sinners, which arrives at the Oscars with 16 nominations (an all-time record), versus Marty Supreme’s nine.

Public Perception:

As the Hollywood Reporter pointed out, Jordan has benefited from not being on the promotional circuit during the lead-up. Chalamet, by contrast, became something of a meme for his campaign theatrics — crashing his own lookalike contest, appearing in EsDeeKid rap videos, releasing actual blimps and staging viral fake Zoom calls. These have boosted his personal celebrity and box office, but the Academy is notoriously conservative. Scott Feinberg of the Hollywood Reporter noted that Chalamet’s aggressive, social media-driven campaign may have tipped him from “innovative” to “annoying” in the eyes of some voters. And while Chalamet has netted individual awards, Marty Supreme itself has collected losses, even setting a record for the most losses at the BAFTA Awards. It’s worth noting here that some feel Marty Supreme, a movie that is ostensibly about a white guy with a serious case of exceptionalism, carries less weight than a film like Sinners, which, set in the Antebellum South, deals in complex themes of racism, white supremacy and the trauma of the Jim Crow-era South.

The importance of these themes was only reinforced during a traumatic scene at last week’s BAFTA awards when a racist slur was audibly shouted at Michael B. Jordan and co-star Delroy Lindo as they presented on stage.

Michael B. Jordan And Timothée Chalamet’s Age:

Finally, age might not be on Chalamet’s side. The Academy has historically steered away from younger Best Actor winners: while more than 30 women have taken home an Oscar before turning 30, only one man ever has — Adrien Brody, for The Pianist, at 29. Brody did not exactly help the cause of young male winners when he kissed Halle Berry onstage, causing public outrage. Leonardo DiCaprio famously waited decades for his win, despite a string of nominations. While Chalamet is unlikely to repeat the stunt with girlfriend Kylie Jenner watching on, he would have to buck a pretty historic trend, and Michael B. Jordan at 39 is far more comfortably in the Academy’s preferred age group.

With the ceremony on March 15, we’re about to find out whether Jordan’s late surge holds, or whether Chalamet — for all the noise — gets the last word.

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