Matt Damon has been an industry favorite since his Good Will Hunting days won the internet alongside Ben Affleck and an evergreen Robin Williams. A few years later, the world lost its collective minds after the American superspy and “serial monogamist” Jason Bourne arrived at the theatres. The role would define his career more than head turners like The Rainmaker and Saving Private Ryan.
But all of it – the billboards, the title of the most eligible bachelor, winning People’s Sexiest Man Alive, founding two production companies with childhood bff Affleck, and working with some of the greatest filmmakers of our time – came in the aftermath of the 1998 Oscar win that perhaps stunned the Boston duo more than any of their peers or fans.
Matt Damon Had the Strangest Reaction To His ’98 Oscar Win
A great, or rather, fulfilling movie career isn’t defined by the number of Oscars picked up over the years by a certain actor or filmmaker, instead, it’s the legacy left behind in their wake. The Academy does not stand as the sole authority over deeming a project as the greatest or the most artistically valuable as was made evidently clear by Crash and Shakespeare in Love winning over such instant and timeless classics like Brokeback Mountain and Saving Private Ryan respectively. Matt Damon, who starred as the titular character of the latter, has always maintained that it was a Tom Hanks film.
The 1998 film was not the sole great thing to kickstart his career in Hollywood. The coming-of-age classic, Good Will Hunting, defined the actor’s potential in the industry in ways unquantifiable. The shock of winning the Academy Award was of course overwhelming to the anonymous writers turned actors. The announcement, as shocking as it was at the core, gave the young actor a taste of Hollywood reality as well as a sampling of the impostor syndrome after returning back from the Oscars holding the gold statuette: “I couldn’t sleep so I was just sitting there looking at the award and I remember thinking very clearly and said to myself thank God I didn’t f–k anyone over for this.”
Matt Damon Felt Conflicted About His Academy Award Win
The Oscars are an event of drama and glory. Artists and their creations are put up on a gilded stage to be declared as the greatest or the most ground-breaking of their time and yet there have been incidents where actual ground-breaking films and projects were too controversial or radical in their tropes than more saturated and over-exploited subjects like that explored in 2005’s Crash. A decade later, a poll conducted by The Hollywood Reporter put Brokeback Mountain as the clear and deserving winner – placing the highly-controversial gay cowboy drama of the time on its rightful throne.
However, people are hardly such constant and unchangeable pieces of work as published art or premiered films. Matt Damon, for one, felt incredulous to have an Academy Award immediately after his foray into the industry rather than the struggle and the feeling of possessing an Oscar that was hard-earned – a quality that Damon’s idol, Heath Ledger definitely possessed, both with Brokeback Mountain as well as Joker in The Dark Knight. Damon claimed,
I felt so blessed because I won it at such a young age. I couldn’t imagine how it would feel to chase it my entire career and not ever getting it.
Matt Damon’s choice in films, ranging from Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan to Clint Eastwood’s Invictus to Ridley Scott’s The Martian has all been Oscar contenders with the latter two earning him Best Supporting Actor and Best Actor respectively. The Spielberg film won a total of 11 Oscar nominations of which it won 5. Suffice it to say, the trailblazing career of Matt Damon has also been a great and fulfilling one.
Source: IMDb
