Matt Damon has revealed why he missed the 2024 Oscars when Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer won seven awards, including Best Picture.
The Oscar winner, who won Best Screenplay alongside Ben Affleck for Good Will Hunting in 1998, said his wife, Luciana Barroso, had a brain aneurysm one week before 2024’s Academy Awards. Damon previously missed the ceremony when his 2006 film, The Departed, won four awards.
“We had this whole scary thing happen where my wife had a brain aneurysm,” he told GQ. “She’s totally fine, thank God, but [she] had this brain surgery the week before the Oscars.”
Oppenheimer, in which Damon played Lieutenant General Leslie Groves, swept the awards, winning Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Score.
Barroso was determined not to let Damon miss out on the festivities this time around, he said.
“It was the first night she felt good enough to get up and had her energy back,” he said, recalling that year’s Oscars night. “And she surprised me and got a dress, and we went out to the after-party, because she remembered that the last time it happened, I didn’t do it. And she was like, ‘This time we’re going out.’ And it was pretty f---ing heroic of her to do that and really meaningful.”
The pair married in 2005 and share four daughters: Stella, 16; Gia, 16; Isabella, 20; and Damon’s stepdaughter, Alexia, 27.
Despite the Oscar success of several of his acting credits, Damon has been nominated for acting only twice—once for Good Will Hunting and again in 2015 for The Martian. He told the magazine that he’s learned not to be salty about the lack of recognition. “It’s not something you can control,” he said.
“You got to just do the work, and that’s got to be the reward. Because it’s like, then if you don’t win, do you feel bad about something that was really positive?” Damon said, adding that it’s “tricky” not to let the snubs turn a successful movie into “something bad.”
It would make more sense for the Academy to give its awards “20 or 25 years later,” he said.
“I always think about old movies, when I look at them, and it says, ‘So-and-so won an Oscar, so-and-so didn’t.’ You’re judging it in a totally different way,” Damon explained. “It’s not attached to that anymore. I think the real way they should do them, really.”
Damon is expected to be nominated again at next year’s Oscars for his role in the blockbuster hit The Odyssey, which is already the upcoming season’s frontrunner.
