Jared Leto will likely be sporting a side-parted low bun when he walks the 86th Academy Awards red carpet, said ombré expert and six-year stylist to the Best Supporting Actor nominee, Chase Kusero, when we talked to him last Thursday (after Bruce Jenner’s new ombré prompted a long email chain, but that’s another story).

Chase told us: “[Jared and I] were going to shock everybody and show up for the Academy Awards with a hair cut, but it’s looking so good that we don’t really want to cut it. We’ll discuss it this weekend. It’s really important that he doesn’t look like a woman—that’s the biggest challenge. It’s been hard to have him not end up on the ‘best hair’ lists—and that definitely hasn’t been our intention. We've even had all these actresses, like Olivia Wilde and Rachel Bilson and Julia Roberts, asking about his hair. He does have amazing hair, so it’s kind of inevitable. He’s definitely going to have long hair at the Oscars.”

He added, “When I see him, we’ll play with his hair for some photos—maybe a high bun, maybe half up, half down—and then go from there. That’s how we got to the pony-bun for the Globes. The big thing on my shoulders right now is if the hair is gonna be up or down—I’m voting up, because we’ve only done it maybe once before. I want to do something with a side part this time, something cleaner. And I want to try to get a bun that’s nice and small, more like a traditional knot. The pony-bun press was kind of funny—I don’t know if he liked all that or not. We both agree that it has to look like something he would do himself.”

UPDATE: All bets are off. Continuing our email chain, as of Saturday afternoon, Chase wrote, “The only thing I can say is that right now I'm all about the 'wet look.'' So...a wet side-parted knot?

Illustration by Annie Kreighbaum.