Timothée Chalamet loses Oscar traction after ballet opera comments

Timothée Chalamet is under fire this week and is losing contention in the best actor Oscar race for saying the most obvious thing in the world: Nobody cares about ballet or opera in 2026.

Here’s the full quote from the “Dune” and “Marty Supreme” star’s recent CNN town hall: “I don’t want to work in ballet or opera or anything like, ‘Hey, keep this thing alive even though no one cares about it anymore.’ Regards to all the ballet and opera people out there.”

The reaction was swift and violent. According to the BBC, Canadian mezzo-soprano Deepa Johnny described Chalamet’s comments as a “disappointing approach”, while American artist Franz Szony wrote: “Two classic art forms that have been around for hundreds of years, both require tremendous amounts of talent and discipline that this man will never have.”

But according to today’s Hollywood pretty boy, who are these people?

When I was 10 years old, the greatest ballet dancer in the world was Mikhail Baryshnikov. He was as famous as Larry Bird or Doc Gooden, as famous as the greatest opera singer of the time, Luciano Pavarotti. This is gone today.

Almost no American today has the slightest idea who the greatest living ballerina or opera singer is because that’s just not their thing anymore. The fine performing arts have become a bubble of progressive intolerance. They don’t want even us unwashed unbelievers to get involved.

Fine performing arts are the last bulwark in which sad woke people are trapped.

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There were published collections of West’s great works in the 1950s. You may have seen some of these leather-bound volumes in your grandparents’ homes. They were very expensive, but publishers couldn’t print them fast enough.

The middle class ate it up.

On any given night in the 1950s and 1960s, one could see a Shakespeare play on television, Leonard Bernstein narrating symphonies, or the great philosophers of the day giving lectures. However, by the 1970s it was decided that this was a bit too much for the masses.

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The Pavarottis and Baryshnikovs would linger into the 1990s, but that ended at the turn of the millennium. Leftist elites had made opera and ballet their exclusive domain, a shrinking and now dying field that Chalamet rightly calls out.

Workers place Donald J. Trump on the existing sign at the Kennedy Center in Washington, Friday, Dec. 19, 2025. (Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo)

The problem with opera and ballet, even straight theater and musicals, was that they stopped looking for audiences and started looking for donations. A bunch of woke, rich white people might give you money to produce the first Inuit opera, but that doesn’t mean anyone will want to see it.

This includes Eskimos.

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One of the things Chalamet realizes here is that opera and ballet have been preserved for 50 years. But who is he protected from?

The urge to diversify and move away from the standard repertoire that everyone loves, for some reason, has led to the fact that this art form has become a delicate flower for the elite among us, and not a powerful product that feeds the soul of the masses.

Now, the same people who supposedly refuse to attend their beloved operas and ballets no longer grace the doors of Trump Kennedy Center performances as their own performance protests, with the result that there is no longer an audience to watch these forms.

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Unfortunately, opera and ballet may actually be dead. There may be no one left in these art forms who can bring the sullen, alert corpses back to life, but Chamamet knows that perhaps movies can avoid that fate. Maybe.

I suspect Hollywood’s new, inoffensive “it guy” will push back on all of this, which will make me long for the days of filmmakers like John Cassavettes who knew how to tell the industry and elites to put it where the sun doesn’t shine.

But his point is valid. It’s ridiculous to even argue. Ballet and opera have reduced themselves to insignificance by appeasing the slogans of wokeness and conforming to its rules. Until this is over they will remain dying forms.

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I think Chalamet has probably learned his lesson here and his punishment will be permanent. But they can’t punish us, and we’ll be here when they want to invite us back to fine arts.

But the creators and shakers of opera, ballet, theatre, painting and sculpture should be warned that while you are squandering the legacy of centuries, we may be just beginning ours.

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