Timothe Chalamets super weird Oscar campaign has been ingenious

When Timothée Chalamet accepted the SAG Award for Best Actor Sunday night, he stunned the A-list room into silence.In a moment of pure New York bravado, the 29-year-old star controversially announced, “I want to be one of the greats.”The megawatt names that the “A Complete Unknown” star desires to be spoken in the same breath as? “I’m as inspired by Daniel Day-Lewis, Marlon Brando and Viola Davis as I am by Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps,” he said.Well, then.That recitation of his vision board was the latest move in one of the strangest — and most hypnotically watchable — awards campaigns in memory.  No staid Arts & Leisure profiles for this guy.Instead, he’s staged weird and silly stunts galore — all over the world. The absurdity has kept him in the public eye without the usual yawn-inducing, perfunctory interviews and comatose photo ops that make award season feel like a black-tie morgue.And, as his SAG win Sunday night showed, the visibility has kept the young actor as a formidable contender in an Oscar race that had previously been “Brutalist” star Adrien Brody’s to lose. Here comes Timmy.    Setting the tone for months of madness, back in October, he crashed a Timothée Chalamet lookalike contest in Washington Square Park.Swoopy-haired men arrived in Greenwich Village dressed as Willy Wonka, Elio and Bob Dylan.

Nobody knew the genuine article would show up, though, and craziness ensued.The event was dispersed by cops and the identical organizers were fined. After that news story exploded, celebrity lookalike contests became a huge trend.There were definitely no Timmy doppelgängers on ESPN’s College GameDay, which he surprisingly guested on two months later.

The actor confused football aficionados when he appeared as a commentator — and actually knew what he was talking about.“Timothee Chalamet being a real deal college football fan, being a SMU fan, and knowing about all these teams was so crazy to me,” wrote...