This Year’s Award Season Controversies, Ranked
Old-tweets-unearthed daughter or AI-revelation son.
The Oscars are tonight! This has been an awards season with bedlam like no other: stan wars (Arianators versus Selenators versus Catholics), a historic snub (the Challengers score), not one blackface controversy but two blackface controversies, Jamie Lee Curtis.
There is so much good this year — the transcendent Nickel Boys, Isabella Rossellini in Conclave, Adrien Brody going topless for the cover of New York! — and just as much bad. For a walk down memory lane ahead of tonight, I’ve ranked the season’s top awards controversies from least controversial to most, based on how much conversation they generated and how likely it is that the actor or film’s chances will be affected by backlash. Feel free to fuss with me in the replies.
The plan for tonight: E!’s coverage starts at 4p ET, which is too early for me personally. I’ll start the red carpet chat around 6p ET. (ABC’s carpet coverage starts at 6:30p.) Just before 7p, when the show starts, I’ll start another chat for the ceremony. (Halfway through, I might start another depending on how much the app is lagging.) Do you need a reminder of how much fun the Hung Up chat is? The Super Bowl’s live chat had 3500 replies! And that was just a football game…
The red carpet chat will be open to everyone. The Oscars chat will be paywalled. For $5 a month (or $50 a year) you can get access to the chat, all four years of Hung Up’s archive, and so much more.
Club Chalamet
Despite the evils of ageism (the Academy’s longstanding bias against awarding young men), sexism (the Academy’s willingness to award young women), natural disasters (the LA fires), fascism (I would say the election, she would say the Kardashians), and racism (honestly not sure about this one), there is a Gen X Timothée Chalamet fan who would will his Best Actor Oscar win into existence if she could. Her name is Club Chalamet.
It was just over a year ago that she was lambasting Chalamet’s girlfriend Kylie Jenner for not taking their man to Olive Garden? She disapproved of their relationship, nicknaming Jenner “slurpie,” for some reason. The romance didn’t compromise her steadfastness; she is so dedicated to Timothee Chalamet that she bought stock in Warner Bros. The day before New Year’s Eve, she posted a dogged rebuke of her foes: “Some people, since 2018, just don't like me, they don't feel that someone like me should be Club Chalamet. Period. The gatekeeping in this fandom, and along the periphery is fucking exhausting, and pathetic. And they hate what Club Chalamet has become, a trusted, fun, engaging source of information about Timothée Chalamet, content created by a fan, shared with fans... the real ones at least. So if you continue to want to follow Club Chalamet, I sincerely hope you enjoy and find value in what I share because I care a lot about the subject matter, and I look at Timothée Chalamet simply with fondness like how a proud aunt would feel about him. It's really as simple as that. And for those of you who engage in ageism, you're sending out to the universe that you don't want to live as long as I have (which I'm not even fucking old old) and you know what, the universe might return that favor and cut your life short, just to spare you the awfulness of reaching my current age of only 58. To my friends, you know who you are, thank you so much for being my friends!” The whole thing is worth reading.
There are many things I can say about Club Chalamet. But at the end of the day … the day gon’ end with her iconic pen:
A sub-category of this is the number of people who think that I am Club Chalamet. I am but a patron of her works…
Ariana Grande’s New Voice
In addition to returning to her roots (white woman) for Wicked1, Ariana Grande’s reliably deep “yuh” took on a different tone as she prepared for, performed in, and press tour-ed Wicked. A clip of Grande on Penn Badgely’s podcast went viral for her voice changing mid-sentence.
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In her Vanity Fair interview with Chris Murphy, Grande defended the adjustment. “There is a part of the world that isn’t familiar with what it takes to transform your voice, whether it’s singing or taking on a different dialect for a role or doing a character voice for something … When it’s a male actor that does it, it’s acclaimed,” Grande said. “There are definitely jokes that are made as well, but it’s always after being led with praise: ‘Oh, wow, he was so lost in the role.’ And that’s just a part of the job, really.” (Austin Butler and Bradley Cooper solemnly nod their heads.) Be serious, this didn’t matter!
Anora Didn’t Use an Intimacy Coordinator
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