His strength, which he has only ever displayed in maybe all of four movies, is his ability to be a complete asshole. No, Matt Damon isn’t at his best when he’s the main guy.
If anyone ever talks about that movie again (which is an entirely fictional scenario because you haven’t even thought of Invictus since 30 minutes after you watched it), it’ll be about Morgan Freeman and how casting is sometimes really obvious. Even in his last Oscar nominated role in Invictus, no one talks about Matt Damon. He’s more or less serviceable in these roles but he never stands out, which is reflected in his 3-for-50 record in nominations. Which is odd, because I don’t believe Matt Damon’s chosen typecasting as “generic hero” is what he does best. I’m going to order this same flavor for the next 30 years.” Variety is the spice of life and Matt Damon insists on eating nothing but oatmeal. It’s like eating a vanilla cone and thinking “hmm. In another equally important way, that’s no damn fun at all. When Matt Damon shows up for a movie, it appears that he just really wants to make a movie for no other motive than fulfilling an actor’s raison d’être.
He is the ultimate “agreeable lead actor for hire”. Whereas DiCaprio has been trying with great frequency to choose roles that will win him an Oscar for the past decade or so (with admittedly varying / little results), Matt Damon appears content being Matt Damon in everything he does. Matt Damon is the anti-Leonardo DiCaprio. You can argue that it’s a fault of the writing that Matt Damon’s characters never expand beyond their surface-level schoolboy heroism, but Matt Damon is largely responsible for choosing the scripts that lead him to be the guy in Green Zone all the time. Matt Damon is playing the same dude in all of them. True Grit is very, very good although I’d argue that Damon’s LaBoeuf was the third best character in the film, a role in which Matt Damon is fine. Matt Damon’s filmography is a long list of “bland, vanilla hero” roles that can uniformly be described as “fine”. However, although not outright awful to the levels of Johnny Depp, his role selection is certainly uninspiring. At worst, it is a filler nomination in a very weak year for the category.īut, again, Matt Damon is a consistently decent actor who is not often in particularly bad movies nor is he ever bad in any role. At best, his nomination is the longest of long shots.
His nomination for The Martian for the Academy Award isn’t even a dark horse candidate for victory. Even the people behind The Martian don’t think Damon could compete with the rest of the Best Actor field, which became obvious when they snuck him in as a nominee and the eventual winner of the Best Actor - Motion Picture Musical or Comedy at the Golden Globes, which says more about how serious the Golden Globes are as a measurement for anything. There’s about fifty (FIFTY!!!) movies in which Matt Damon has acted between Good Will Hunting and The Martian, the movie that has garnered him his third nomination. Since then, he’s been nominated for a grand total of one (one!) Academy Award, which was for Best Supporting Actor for his role in Invictus, a role I honestly can’t remember a single thing about. That’s the same year Titanic came out and John Elway led the Broncos to the Super Bowl as a player. Damon won, as a writer, an Academy Award in 1998 for Best Screenplay to Good Will Hunting, the same year and film he was nominated as Best Actor for. Then again, he’s never really been nominated for any awards.
“Thank you to all the straight white guys,” said Asian hero Alan Yang as he accepted his award for Master of None at the Critics’ Choice Awards, “who dominated movies and TV so hard and for so long that stories about anyone else seems kind of fresh and original right now.” According to Yang (albeit jokingly), he looked Matt Damon right in the eyes as he said it.