With all due respect to “Black Panther,” 2019 feels like the year we need to start having a serious conversation about comic book movies and award season. With Robert Downey Jr. already a popular pick among fans for his performance in “Avengers: Endgame,” and Joaquin Phoenix and “Joker“ coming on strong after their surprising Venice Film Festival win, this is shaping up as a year where comic book adaptations of varying pedigrees are lining up for their crack at Oscar gold.
This was the subject of a recent conversation between The Daily Beast and the Russo Brothers. The two filmmakers weighed in on Downey’s ‘Endgame’ performance and the possibility that he might win an Oscar for the role of Tony Stark. “I don’t know if I have ever seen—in movie history—a global audience react to a performance the way they did to Robert Downey in that movie,” Joe Russo told the Beast. “There were people bawling in movie theaters, hyperventilating. I mean, that is a profound performance, when you can touch audiences all over the world to that degree. We’ve never seen anything like that, and if that doesn’t deserve an Oscar, I don’t know what does.”
READ MORE: Jon Favreau Believes That Robert Downey Jr. Deserves Oscar Love for ‘Avengers’
In addition to voicing their support of Downey, the brothers also shared their perspective on the anti-populist approach of the Academy Awards. “We’ll say this: there certainly is a disconnect between the Academy and popular audiences,” Joe Russo suggested. “It started about 20 years ago. If you go back and look at the Academy Awards up until that point, they were in sync with popular audiences.” In the eyes of the Russo Brothers, the Academy Awards were shifted off-course when Harvey Weinstein began to actively campaign for smaller films to take home awards. Right or wrong, they view movies like ‘Endgame’ as having a better claim to award season recognition than some would believe.
Should Downey win an Academy Award for his work on the ‘Avengers’ series? I’m not sure I’d go that far, but I will say that there’s an excellent sense of symmetry to the actor receiving a nomination for ‘Endgame.’ There have been three distinct periods in Downey’s career, and two of them come with unsuccessful Oscar campaigns. There were Downey’s early days in Hollywood, where the young actor offered talent and trouble to studios in equal measure; he was nominated for “Chaplin“ in 1993, still one of his best performances. Then there were the post-arrest 2000s, when a handful of filmmakers familiar with Downey’s talent gambled on him by casting him in unconventional roles (“The Singing Detective“ and “A Scanner Darkly,” to name a few); this culminated in his Best Supporting Actor nomination for “Tropic Thunder.”
Finally, there are the ‘Iron Man‘ years, where Downey was the public face of Hollywood’s biggest franchise and one of the industry’s highest-paid actors. Tony Stark’s Oscar campaign may be the equivalent of a lifetime achievement award – a la the ‘Lord of the Rings‘ films – but as I said, there’s a neatness to it all that cannot be denied.