It seemed Timothée Chalamet was campaigning for an Oscar on vibes. His SAG win hints he's playing the same game as Adrien Brody.

While Adrien Brody bares the depths of his soul in interviews and poses for the covers of magazines, Timothée Chalamet is pulling double duty on Saturday Night Live and making bizarrely accurate football predictions on ESPN. They’re both playing the same game — with very different strategies.

Both are Best Actor front-runners at the Oscars, with Brody in the lead, because he’s already beaten Chalamet at the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards and British Film and Television Association (BAFTA) Awards. Chalamet gained momentum at the last second, though, with a win at the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) Awards. Final voting for the Academy Awards opened on Feb. 11 amid the biggest midseason shake-up in awards history, thanks to the downfall of Emilia Pérez. Anything could happen.

Brody’s campaign is more traditional. The 51-year-old starred in The Brutalist, a 3-hour-and-35-minute beast of a film about a fictional architect who survives the Holocaust in Hungary and flees to the United States in pursuit of the American dream. In it, Brody’s character constantly faces grief and mistreatment.

He told Yahoo Entertainment in December that he has an “intimate” understanding of the film because his mother is a Hungarian immigrant. He also delved into the significance of the role in his lengthy, high-profile features for New York Magazine and Variety, which yielded sexy yet thoughtful photoshoots. He also posed for a demure ad campaign with J.Crew. Winning so many awards has also allowed him to make acceptance speeches in which he praises his loved ones and ancestors.

Brody appeared to be the clear front-runner for the Oscar until late January, when news circulated that The Brutalist used an artificial intelligence tool in post-production to perfect minor details in Brody and Felicity Jones’s performances. The film’s editor, Dávid Jancsó, said it was “mainly just replacing letters here and there,” and its director, Brady Corbet, said, “Adrien and Felicity’s performances are completely their own.”

Brody won the Oscar for Best Actor in 2003, when he was 29, for his role as a Holocaust survivor in The Pianist. He has picked up a few accolades over the years, but nothing as big as that, and never at the Academy Awards.

In his Golden Globe acceptance speech, Brody tearfully said, "There was a time not too long ago that I felt this may never be a moment afforded to me again."

He also explained why the role was was so personal to him.

"The character’s journey is very reminiscent of my mother’s and my ancestors’ journey of fleeing war and coming to this great country. I owe so much to my mother and my grandparents for their sacrifice," Brody continued. "And although I do not know fully how to express all of the challenges that you have faced and experienced and the many people who have struggled immigrating to this country, I hope that this work stands to lift you up a bit and to give you a voice. I’m so grateful. I will cherish this moment forever.”

If 29-year-old Chalamet won the Oscar, he would be the youngest Best Actor winner in history — a record previously set by Brody himself. Chalamet was nominated in the category once before, in 2018, for his lead role in Call Me by Your Name, and has played key roles in several Best Picture nominations over the years, including Little Women, Dune, Lady Bird and Don’t Look Up. None of those won, either.

Chalamet plays Bob Dylan in A Complete Unknown, which follows the legendary singer at a pivotal moment in his life, when he broke with tradition and embraced his own path, changing the course of American music history.

Chalamet spent five years in Dylan boot camp, learning to sing, play the guitar and harmonica and master the singer's unique mannerisms. He didn’t really know much about him going into the project, but he’s now a proud member of “the Church of Bob.” In an interview with Yahoo Entertainment in December, Chalamet said his “greatest hope” for the film is that more people are introduced to Dylan's music.

Since then, his campaign has taken a kooky turn. He appeared as a guest on ESPN’s College Gameday, where his guest picks performed so well that X users dubbed him “Lisan al-Gaib.” That’s a term used in the other Best Picture nomination Chalamet stars in, Dune: Part Two, to describe an all-seeing prophet.

He’s duplicated Dylan’s looks through the years on red carpets, embraced his doppelg?ngers from October’s look-alike contests, brought an e-bike to a film premiere, hosted and performed as a musical guest on Saturday Night Live, shared a bizarre and still-unexplained Instagram Live dance performance set to a Black Eyed Peas song, interviewed Super Bowl halftime performer Kendrick Lamar and done viral interviews with internet darlings Brittany Broski and Narduwar.

Though his campaign has seemed playfully aloof, Chalamet made it known during his SAG Award acceptance speech that he's very serious about his career.

“I know we’re in a subjective business, but the truth is, I’m really in pursuit of greatness,” he said. “I know people don’t usually talk like that, but I want to be one of the greats. ... I’m as inspired by Daniel Day-Lewis, Marlon Brando and Viola Davis as I am by Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps — and I want to be up there. So I’m deeply grateful. This doesn’t signify that, but it’s a little more fuel. it’s a little more ammo to keep going. Thank you so much.”

He acknowledged that the "classiest thing" he could do is "downplay the effort that went into this role and how much this means to me, but the truth is this was five and a half years of my life."

Chalamet became the youngest-ever winner of the Best Actor SAG Award at 29, breaking the record then-32-year-old Nicolas Cage set in 1995 for Leaving Las Vegas. (Though Brody won the Oscar when he was 29, he lost the SAG Award to Daniel Day-Lewis for his role in Gangs of New York).

"Youngest ever? I like the sound of that. Wow ... I wanna be the youngest and I wanna be the oldest," he told Entertainment Tonight after his win.

Although both Brody and Chalamet made their breakthrough as serious actors while young, those debuts came at very different times. Chalamet’s recent coming-of-age happened in the internet era, where his digital footprint adds depth to his persona. Video of him performing a rap as “Lil Timmy Tim” for his high school statistics class regularly circulates, and he’s not shy about addressing it. Brody has a social media presence with a significant following on X and Instagram, but no deeper lore online.

In contrast with the quirky Best Actor race, the competition for Best Picture is imploding. Controversial X posts from Emilia Pérez star and Best Actress nominee Karla Sofía Gascón resurfaced, resulting in a profound shake-up for the film’s front-runner status, just days after it racked up a whopping 13 nods. Anora, the current Best Picture front-runner after sweeping the PGA Awards and DGA Awards, doesn’t have a Best Actor nominee to carry to victory.

It’s anyone’s race, and both Brody and Chalamet are campaigning their hardest in the way that fits with their personas: poise vs. chaos. We’ll see which vibe — and which performance — the academy favors most.