Everyone’s Mad At Timothée Chalamet For Bashing On Opera And Ballet—So How Will It Affect The Oscars?

When Timothée Chalamet decided to bring up opera and ballet during his Variety and CNN town all discussion with Matthew McConaughey, he probably didn’t think much about it at all.

“I admire people—and I’ve done it myself—you want to talk about, hey, we gotta keep movie theaters alive,” he told McConaughey. “You know, we gotta keep this genre alive. And another part of me feels like, if people wanna see like ‘Barbie,’ like ‘Oppenheimer,’ they’re gonna go see it and go out of their way to be loud and proud about it. I don’t wanna be working in ballet, or opera, or things where, like, hey, keep this thing alive even though no one cares about this anymore.”

After this explanation, Chalamet quickly added: “All respect to the ballet and opera people out there. I just lost fourteen cents in viewership. Damn, I just took shots for no reason.”

It turns out, he may have lost more than just fourteen cents in viewerships—he may have also lost a LOT of respect from his colleagues.

While art institutions across the U.S., such as The Met Opera, quickly spoke out against Chalamet’s comments, celebrities were soon to follow. Singer Doja Cat was perhaps the first to go viral for shading Chalamet, posting a video to Instagram.

In the video, Doja Cat said:

Hey, by the way, opera is 400 years old. Ballet is 500 years old. Somebody named Timothee Chalamet had the nerve—big guy, by the way—had the nerve to say on camera that nobody cares about it. I’m sure you can watch into an opera theater right now, seats will be filled out, and nobody saying a word as the performance is going because everybody has that much respect for it. There is an etiquette around opera. There is etiquette around ballet. It’s amazing. It’s an amazing theater medium. It’s f*cking beautiful. And people go there every day to the dance studio. Dancers show up 8 a.m., 6 a.m., whatever the f*ck. They show up and they break and they bleed every single day, just because they have respect for it. They love it. They love what they do. It doesn’t matter if the industry is having a tough time at any time, which a lot of industries have a tough time. Your industry has a tough time. My industry has a tough time. Doesn’t mean people don’t care about it. People care. The dancers care. The singers care. The audience cares. They’re still an audience. People give a f*ck. You show up in a nice outfit, you sit the f*ck down, and you shut the f*ck up. That’s the usual etiquette around those things. Maybe learn something from that.

Not long after, ballet dancer Misty Copeland spoke up about the controversy during a panel for Aveeno . Copeland famously helped promote ‘Marty Supreme,’ the movie Chalamet is currently facing an Oscar nomination—and potential win—for.

Copeland said:

First I have to say that it’s very interesting that he invited me to be a part of promoting ‘Marty Supreme’ with respect to my art form. I think that it’s important that we acknowledge that, yes, this is an art form that’s not ‘popular’ and a part of pop culture as movies are, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have enduring relevance in culture. I think that it’s often mistaken when something is popular that it’s meaningful or impactful, and there’s a reason that the opera and ballet have been around for over 400 years. […] I mean, he wouldn’t be an actor and have the opportunities he has as a movie star if it weren’t for opera and ballet and their relevance in that medium. So all of these mediums have a space and we shouldn’t be comparing them.

Even singer Charlie Puth had something he wanted to say:

I feel compelled to say that even when an art form isn’t at the height of its popularity, traces of it still live on in the music and cinema that resonate with people today. The popular music we hear now simply wouldn’t exist without the popular music that came before it centuries ago.

But it’s not just people outside Chalamet’s industry that seemed to take issue with his words. While Matthew McConaughey appeared to understand what the actor meant, others felt his words rubbed them the wrong way, such as acting veteran Jamie Lee Curtis:

My daughter has been a dancer her whole life, my daughter teaches dance and has a dance academy, so his comments are silly, and I’m sorry that they’re going to be a bit of his legacy now. I’m sure he regrets the comment because you can’t throw those art forms under a bus. You can’t do it. They’re too important. Does that mean that there’s not a reduction in audiences for those art forms? I’m sure there is. Does that mean it’s going to be the destruction of those art forms? No.

It’s a whole lot of attention to get during the lead up of the Academy Awards, and not in the way he probably hoped. Chalamet has been campaigning for a best actor win for ‘Marty Supreme,’ which he’s allocated much of his own money and time to promote.

The real question is: Could Timothée Chalamet lose the Oscar because of the industry’s newfound beef with him?

The answer is simple: No, not really.

While Chalamet may have made the comments a few weeks ago, they only really surfaced over the past few days. Oscar voting officially closed on March 5, which means if Timothée loses, it has nothing to do with his stance on ballet or opera—it’s all his own work.

That being said, it will be interesting to see how this latest scandal will affect him during the Academy Awards this weekend. Will his potential win be overshadowed by people’s criticism about his attitude? Or will it make the possible loss hit that much harder? Will the press be scrutinizing him more than usual? And if he does win, which colleagues will be willing to celebrate with him publicly as many others continue to drag his public image through the mud?

Either way, one thing’s for sure: People are going to have something to say.