Oscar voter admits meeting Robert Downey Jr ‘tipped the scales’ for his vote

Downey Jr is competing in the Best Supporting Actor category at the 2024 Oscars

One Oscars voter has confessed that a positive interaction with Robert Downey Jr at an awards season party influenced his decision to side with the Oppenheimer star.

Downey Jr, 58, is currently in contention for Best Supporting Actor at the 2024 Oscars. He is up against American Fiction’s Sterling K Brown, Killers of the Flower Moon’s Robert De Niro, Barbie’s Ryan Gosling and Poor Things’ Mark Ruffalo.

“I was torn between [Poor Things’] Mark Ruffalo and [Oppenheimer’s] Robert Downey Jr,” the anonymous male Academy member admitted to The Hollywood Reporter, “and even though it’s cheesy I’ll be real with you: I met Downey at an awards season party, we had an interaction that I did not initiate, and it tipped the scales for me.

“Campaigning matters! [Laughs.] What’s really great about him as an actor, in this film and so many others, is his ability to be believable all the time. I loved watching him turn as the story turned on [Lewis] Strauss,” he said.

He also revealed that he had voted for Nolan in the Best Director category. “This was an easy one: [Oppenheimer’s] Christopher Nolan has deserved to win this award since The Dark Knight, and he really deserves to win it for this one, the most monumental achievement of his career,” he praised.

However, when it came to Best Picture, he said that Jonathan Glazer’s holocaust drama Zone of Interest edged out Oppenheimer on his ballot.

Robert Downey Jr as Lewis Strauss in ‘Oppenheimer’ (© Universal Studios. All Rights Reserved.)

“Choosing between Oppenheimer and The Zone of Interest was so hard. Oppenheimer is a movie that advanced cinema,” he said. “But no movie made me feel like Zone of Interest.”

The Academy’s voting body is made up of fewer than 10,000 industry professionals who are a part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The voting window for the 2024 Oscars officially closed on Tuesday (27 February).

Winners will be announced during the live broadcast on 10 March from the Dolby Theatre, beginning at 4pm PT/7pm ET. Read here for details on how and where you can watch the ceremony.

Oppenheimer leads the Oscars race with a whopping 13 nominations.

It is followed closely by Yorgos Lanthimos’s absurdist sci-fi comedy Poor Things and Greta Gerwig’s blockbuster fantasy Barbie, which have 11 and eight nods, respectively.