My goodness but he was pretty in the eighties. Actually, I’d say the earliest movie where he was starting to look handsome instead of pretty was Chances Are, only a year or so before Soapdish. Even in Chaplin, which was later, there are still a few scenes. These days, after many years of addiction and at the age of fifty-two, he’s starting to look a bit rugged. The planes of his face have sharpened some. He’s still a mightily attractive man, goodness knows, but he no longer looks quite so feminine in the face. I feel certain I’ve seen him in drag at least once, though I cannot for the life of me remember in what, and it was extremely convincing.

When he was cast as Tony Stark, most of the people with whom I discussed the news just nodded. After all, playing a drunken womanizer was not exactly going to be a stretch for him. That, combined with the acting ability he’d shown even at the height of his addiction, meant there was no doubt to us—though apparently considerable to other people on the internet, somehow—that he would be ideal for the role. He was also extremely well suited to the dissipated version of Sherlock Holmes we got in the Guy Ritchie films, a portrayal I wrote about for the most recent Lovefest. And he calls Julian from Less Than Zero a bit of a Ghost of Christmas Future for him, though addiction being what it is, it didn’t stop the drug use.

I read once that the reason he makes so many movies is that his wife forces him to. She believes that, if he stays busy, he won’t slip back into his old patterns. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but if it is, I want him to be in just as many movies as it takes. Not just because I like watching his Tony Stark, either; it doesn’t entirely matter to me if the movies are worth watching in this scenario. What matters is that we’re talking about a person whose father gave him his first joint when he was eight, someone who to this day has a clause written into his contracts that some of his (vast) paycheck is held back if he doesn’t finish the film, because he was pretty well uninsurable on movies—and his forgiveness of Mel Gibson is one I can understand, because it was Gibson who paid his insurance when he was proving that this rehabilitation would take.

He’s pretty confident that he’s going to get an Oscar one of these days, even though he hasn’t yet. He figures it’ll happen in a year when someone else deserves it more, because that’s how the system works. When he lost to Al Pacino, it wasn’t because Scent of a Woman was the best acting of the year; I’ve seen both movies, and Robert Downey, Jr., was better in Chaplin. (Frankly, it’s one of those years where literally every nominated performance was better than the winning one.) It’s because it was Pacino’s eighth nomination, and if he hadn’t won, he would’ve broken the record for nominations without a win. Everyone knew that, presumably including Pacino.

Of course, when he lost Best Supporting for Tropic Thunder, it was to Heath Ledger, which is this whole different conversation. I’m not surprised that he’s never gotten a nomination for Tony Stark and not hugely surprised that he didn’t get one for Sherlock Holmes; those are performances the Academy isn’t inclined to reward regardless of quality. Yes, all right, Heath Ledger won for a superhero movie, but that was a different situation, and frankly Heath Ledger’s performance itself should have been enough to get him the win, and his death was just what pushed it over the Academy’s prejudices; it would be hard to begrudge that particular win.

Should Robert Downey, Jr. (I can’t think of him any other way), have been nominated for the role of David Seton Barnes, for Soapdish? I’d have to dig further into the films of 1991 to be sure. It’s the year Jack Palance won for City Slickers, so it’s clearly not a year where the Academy was averse to awarding comedy—which tends to do better in the Supporting categories than the lead ones, I think, though I haven’t done an analysis on that. But it’s a year with a nomination for JFK and two for Bugsy. And I’ve seen both those movies and like Soapdish better. I’m just not sure that the neurotic, ambitious David is that powerful a performance. It’s fun, but fun isn’t and shouldn’t be all it takes to get an Oscar nomination.

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