Four days to the Oscars and, update, people are still mad at Timothée Chalamet – at least here in the west. Like I said yesterday, I wonder whether or not Timmy will make it into Conan O’Brien’s monologue on Sunday night, whether it’s a joke or a more elaborate bit. Over the last week, it’s kinda become the biggest online story about the Oscars, almost monoculture when you consider how many outlets have covered Timmy’s gaffe, how many celebrities have mentioned it, and how even Jeopardy! is taking shots a him. Plus the fact that he’s an Oscar nominee this year and, had the Oscars been three weeks ago, might even have won it by now. We’ll come back to timing in a minute, let me just get the other update on Timmy out of the way: he’s still in Beijing and was hanging out with for NBA star Stephon Marbury today.

Stephon rebuilt his career in China, has been there for years, and actually has permanent resident status. That’s why he’s almost acting like a host to Timmy in this video.

Timmy and Stephon also played ping pong together and Timmy also showed up on Guan Xiaotong IG stories.

Guan Xiaotong IG stories

Guan Xiaotong started out as a child actor, became quite popular, and for years dated Luhan, a popstar. The closest western equivalent I can think of here is Justin Bieber – and their relationship was kinda like Justin and Selena Gomez. They’re no longer together, and Luhan has fallen out of favour recently for behaviour similar to JB’s when he was seen as a young punk.

And here’s Timmy performing fan service for a Chinese audience.

Basically he’s ingratiating himself to the Chinese public to promote Marty Supreme. The movie opens there on March 20 and I’m really curious to see how it does in China given the potential audience size, how they might respond to this character through their lens. Western audiences find Marty Mauser extremely unlikeable (he is) but a Chinese moviegoer doesn’t go into an American filming expecting to like an American character. Chinese moviegoers might actually enjoy the experience of watching an unlikeable American character sabotage his career and lose at almost everything, LOL.

Anyway, while Timmy continues to show a different side in China than he has in the west, it’s not like he can stay there forever. He’ll likely be on his way back to the US for the Oscars this weekend. So we go back to the timing of all of this, at the peak of his unpopularity so far in his career.

But that, probably, wasn’t the plan. The plan was for him to be going into Oscars weekend as a clear frontrunner with all the momentum and not as a former frontrunner currently in a tight race for gold. The plan was, perhaps, for him to show up to the Oscars – like last year – with Kylie Jenner beside him in the front row, both of them smugly enjoying the victory lap. I say both because Kylie covers the new issue of Vanity Fair, just released today.

If it had all gone to plan, they’d essentially be the prom king and queen of Hollywood, with him poised to be crowned best actor and her on the front page of the spring issue announcing her entry into acting. That’s one of the takeaways of the piece, pegged to Kylie’s cameo in Charli XCX’s The Moment: Kylie is declaring her ambitions to be an actor. She says that scripts are coming her way, but nothing she’s read has felt right so far but that she’s definitely looking for opportunities.

I’m rolling my eyes along with you, at both the acting thing and the VF profile overall but as fawning as it is, there are some truths here. It is true that she has emerged as her family’s new #1, taking over from Kim. It is true that for Gen Z, who grew up with her on social media, she is one of the megastars of her generation, and Timmy belongs to that generation too. That should, in part, explain the attraction. Kylie has the most followers on social media of anyone in her family. Schiaparelli’s Daniel Roseberry is out here in this Vanity Fair piece talking about how obsessed he is with her. Everyone in my life under 30 is the same. They are critical, often, but there’s not one post they haven’t seen, there’s not one move that goes undetected, they talk about her all the time.

Plus, of course, she shares her family’s most powerful gene: they seem impervious to controversy. Smaller scandals have brought down ostensibly more prominent figures and yet these Kardashian-Jenners keep on keeping up. It’s infuriating, it’s fascinating, that they thrive whether they’re loved or they’re hated, whether they’re on script or off script. But this superpower doesn’t expand beyond the borders of their DNA. The developments of the last few weeks were probably not on script, at least not the one that Timothée’s team was following. Like I said, to me the Kylie Vanity Fair cover story looks like it was meant to be a joint victory lap which might turn out to be a little premature, depending on what happens on Sunday. He’s definitely not out of the race, but it’s also not as comfortable as it was looking just a month ago.

Click here for more of Kylie in Vanity Fair.

Photo credits: Mert Alas/Vanity Fair

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