Fury over Timothée Chalamet’s comments about ballet or Jessie Buckley not liking cats has reached a bizarre fever pitch as the industry wills this Sunday to arrive faster
Around day five of debate over what Timothée Chalamet said and/or meant about opera and ballet, it started to feel like maybe the 2025-2026 Oscar season had actually lasted for the past 17 years.
Voting for the 98th annual Academy awards concluded on 5 March, but that didn’t stop the internet from throwing a bunch of attempted buzzer-beaters; an interview where Chalamet casually referred to ballet and opera as potentially endangered (and perhaps not especially relevant) art forms was actually held some weeks ago in a conversation with fellow actor Matthew McConaughey. But it was that same vote-closing on Thursday when the clip started to circulate virally online and rebuttals poured in. This was swiftly followed by counter-charges that most likely the majority of people excoriating Chalamet, campaigning for best actor in Marty Supreme, had themselves not been the ballet or opera especially recently.
At least no one asked Chalamet how he feels about the stage show Cats. Around the same time as the young actor was catching hell from a nation’s angry mob of alleged opera aficionados, another clip from earlier in the Oscar season resurfaced. In this one, best actress contender Jessie Buckley, nominated for her role as a grieving mother (and William Shakespeare’s woodsy wife) in Hamnet, discussing her supposed dislike of cats – the animal, not the show. She alluded to the latter when she subsequently claimed on a Tonight Show appearance that she was in fact a “cat lover”, which doesn’t exactly square with her joking about giving her cat-owning future husband a them-or-me ultimatum.
