‘Hamnet’ star Jessie Buckley said she doesn’t like cats. Will it help or hurt her Oscar chances?
In presidential campaigns, candidates live in fear of the dreaded October Surprise — an embarrassing news story that breaks in the closing days of the campaign, dominating headlines and, potentially, costing the frontrunner a victory.
In recent years, the same phenomenon has begun to haunt Hollywood’s annual Oscar race.
Last year, revelations about the use of AI during the production of “The Brutalist” were considered by many to have knocked the film off the inside track to Best Picture.
And this year, for a couple of acting frontrunners, the cows — or perhaps the cats — are coming home to roost.
KJZZ’s resident culture expert, Amanda Kehrberg, joined The Show to talk about it.
Amber Victoria Singer
/
KJZZ
Amanda Kehrberg in KJZZ’s studios in 2024.
Full conversation
DINGMAN: So why are we talking about cats here in the closing days of Oscar voting?
KEHRBERG: OK, so the person who’s considered the far and away frontrunner for the best actress award this year is Jessie Buckley, incredible Irish actress for her performance in Hamnet. And a clip from an interview on the press circuit back in November with she and her co-star Paul Mescal actually emerged and went viral just this month in which she’s asked about her opinions on cats.
And she and Paul both say they do not like cats. And she is much more strident about it. Even had her now-husband get rid of his two cats before they moved in together.
DINGMAN: Oh, OK. OK. Well, this. She’s of course, not alone in this. There’s also been a bit of controversy regarding Mr. Timothée Chalamet.
KEHRBERG: Yes.
DINGMAN: What did he say?
KEHRBERG: Oh, Chalamet. Chalamet said that pretty much nobody cares about opera and ballet anymore. And he did that in an argument for we need to save cinema, which —
DINGMAN: Oh, boy.
KEHRBERG: Oh, yeah, yeah, It’s a rough one. You know, I would say maybe Oscar nominees need to stop having hot takes, particularly this close to the Oscars.
But, you know, you’re getting your name out there.
DINGMAN: Sure.
KEHRBERG: I mean, going viral is creating a buzz. So that could be seen as some kind of campaign idea?
DINGMAN: Sure, I guess. No such thing as negative press, perhaps.
KEHRBERG: Yeah, I believe that’s not true in the digital age anymore. But you know what? Maybe I’m wrong.
Timothée Chalamet in “Marty Supreme.”
DINGMAN: So how did this — let’s make sure we close the loop on this. How did this cat discourse resolve itself, if it has?
KEHRBERG: You know, definitely there’s still a little touch of controversy. I will say Chalamet really coming in with the anti-opera, anti-ballet take helped move the cat discourse along. But Jessie Buckley has since come out and said, “You know, I actually love cats. Maybe just these cats specifically were bad cats. Not all cats.”
DINGMAN: Hashtag notallcats.
KEHRBERG: Yes, exactly. Doechii is sticking by her guns that cats are fundamentally unfriendly animals and all of us cat owners — me included — are in some ways lying to ourselves. But yeah, I think this is a fun one because it is really the core, most ancient personality test is: Are you a cat person or are you a dog person?
DINGMAN: Well, yes.
KEHRBERG: I mean, maybe post are you a hunter or are you a gatherer?
DINGMAN: Right. Phase one, phase two.
KEHRBERG: Yes.
DINGMAN: Well, let’s just talk for a second, Amanda, about. I think maybe for some listeners, the idea that Oscar campaigns are, in fact, campaigns might be somewhat unfamiliar. I mean, one of the reasons that we have actors this late in the game continuing to go out on the press circuit and give interviews is because they know that people are still voting.
KEHRBERG: Yeah.
DINGMAN: And in some cases, the voters may not have watched their movies yet.
KEHRBERG: In alarmingly many cases. Yeah. It’s only in April 2025, actually, that they instituted the rule for this next season that all voters in a category were required to watch the movies. They’re voting on all of the movies, which now these days in the Best Picture category, that’s up to 10 films.
DINGMAN: Bunch of movies, yeah.
KEHRBERG: Yeah. It’s a lot of movies. And I get these are busy people. But if you are voting in a category, I think we all agree you should have seen the film.
DINGMAN: One would hope.
KEHRBERG: Yeah, even that is policed a little bit on an honor system, so we’ll see how that goes. But campaigning for Oscar nominations has been a huge thing throughout the history of Hollywood and awards, with a number of controversies. Bribery. Harvey Weinstein actually is one of the reasons we have a lot of the rules that we do have because of aggressive campaigning, gifts, lavish parties.
You’re not allowed now to even ask someone for their vote. The shift we had recently was just a couple years ago, Andrea Riseborough had a really, really surprising nomination. And a lot of journalists hadn’t even heard of the indie film “To Leslie” that she was nominated for.
And it turned out that they had pretty much just gotten a lot of buzz from celebrities who knew her and were her friends, people like Cate Blanchett who got online and said, “Go see this performance. Academy voters, go see this performance.”
And they decided to walk back even social media rules now, so you’re not even really supposed to tag voters.
DINGMAN: Wow. Wow.
KEHRBERG: I mean, there’s like so little you can do, which is why I’m starting to rethink maybe, maybe a controversy, at least, is getting people in the mind of voters.
DINGMAN: Right. A hate watch is still a watch.
KEHRBERG: A hate watch is still a watch.
DINGMAN: Well, let’s go back to this cat thing just momentarily, because as you pointed out, this is one of the oldest debates in culture, and it’s also one of the oldest hot button conversations on the internet, right? Don’t mess with cats.
KEHRBERG: Don’t mess with cats. No, that’s considered rule zero of the internet. Because if you think about who are the early adopters of online technologies, who was getting online on the Usenet boards, you have a lot of, let’s say, cat people. A lot of computer engineers, academics, journalists — a lot of indoor people who are working on their computers and maybe not going out to walk the dog.
It’s funny because there is a little correlation-not-causation here, because cat people tend to overlap with a lot of studious indoor activities, urban centers versus suburbs. So there is also a documented political bent in cat people versus dog people.
But online, if you think of how that was established, those early memes we were sharing, those were cat memes.
If you ask Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web, what’s the thing that surprised you most? He didn’t say many of the frightful things you might have thought he would say. Instead, he said all of the kittens.
DINGMAN: Right, right, right. Well. And there are plenty of people who tune their algorithms when they’re feeling stressed out about politics and the news to just show them pictures of cats.
KEHRBERG: Exactly. No, there’s been academic research done on this that cat videos give us positive emotions. They give us a boost of energy. Yeah, they’re great.
DINGMAN: Well, in the last 20 seconds or so here, Amanda, we should also talk about the different relationship between cats and dogs and movies.
KEHRBERG: Yes. OK, so dogs have had such success in Hollywood that they even have their own award at the Cannes Film Festival, which is called the Palm Dog Award. So if you think of that little terrier in “The Artist,” that was one of the winners of the Palm Dog. Whereas cats, I think we think of them as sometimes showing up on the lap of a Bond villain.
DINGMAN: Or Don Corleone.
KEHRBERG: Yes, yeah, exactly. Whereas dogs really teach a character about their humanity. So like, give Jack Nicholson a dog; things are going to go well.
KJZZ’s The Show transcripts are created on deadline. This text is edited for length and clarity, and may not be in its final form. The authoritative record of KJZZ’s programming is the audio record.
