Has any actor worked so hard with such little result as Timothée Chalamet this Oscars campaign? When everything is totted up, the tally will surely suggest so: thousands of air miles and tiny orange ping-pong balls expended, but no gold statuette, as both he and his film Marty Supreme were shut out entirely of this year’s Academy Awards. For so long Chalamet’s grand tour looked a work of wide-eyed gonzo genius. It started with a “leaked” Zoom call comedy skit where the 30-year-old pitched increasingly absurd promotional ideas for his new film Marty Supreme – breakfast cereal tie-ins! Blimps! Painting the Eiffel the same violent orange as the ping-pong balls in the film! – to an audience of nervously nodding marketing execs. The skit was preposterous, sure, but also a tiny bit predictive of the actual campaign. The Eiffel tower might not have been painted orange, but the blimp took off, and so did Chalamet. Broadcast across every medium, from Insta to old-fashioned network TV, appearing in just about every country, aimed at every audience – sports bros, thespians, fans of half-forgotten, foghorn-voiced talent show winners – he projected a confident ubiquity dialled down just a few notches from his character: brilliant, striving, a little insufferable. And it worked a treat, turning a 50s-set picaresque indie caper into studio A24’s highest grossing film ever, and hoovering up award after award for its star. By the time he won the Golden Globe in January for best actor in a musical or comedy, bookies had made him a heavy odds-on favourite for the Oscar. But the endless-seeming January to March stretch from the Globes to the Academy Awards is often the point where consensus solidifies – witness Jessie Buckley’s unopposed glide to best actress – or crumbles. And in the case of Chalamet it was the latter of the two: at the Actor awards (formerly the SAG awards) two weekends ago, things had shifted so markedly that Michael B Jordan’s victory in the best actor category felt half-expected. And by the time of Jordan’s Oscars win, it felt inevitable. View image in fullscreen In pursuit of greatness … Timothée Chalamet in Marty Supreme. Photograph: Landmark Media/Alamy So what happened? Certainly some will argue that the tour dragged on for too long, that Chalamet’s ever-presences started to count against him: the endless boldly sartorial red carpet appearances alongside girlfriend Kylie Jenner, the chat show appearances, podcasts, music video cameos and the like. And the more some saw of Chalamet the less they liked him, a sensation growing that he was more like his smirking, fame-hungry character than they first imagined. You can imagine voters who had already bristled at Chalamet’s “pursuit of greatness” speech at the previous year’s Actor awards, where he declared that he wanted to be remembered alongside sportsmen like “Michael Jordan and Michael Phelps” as well as acting giants, will have found this latest campaign infuriating – although it should be noted that his now notorious snipes against opera and ballet were made after voting had closed. But equally this might simply be a case of the Academy not wanting to reward a young star too early. Turns have to be waited for at the Oscars, where so often awards are given for a body of work than individual performances. Chalamet would, and indeed has pointed out that he does have a pretty formidable body of work (“It’s been like seven, eight years that I feel like I’ve been handing in really, really committed, top-of-the-line performances”). Those roles though, while often brilliant, have been of a piece: callow, over-confident young men with lots still to learn about the world. Perhaps some voters are waiting to see what sort of actor Chalamet evolves into before giving him the gong. One thing’s for sure: given his quest for greatness, he’s not likely to stop trying any time soon. Marketers: fire up the Zoom call and start budgeting for another wild campaign this time next year.