Robert Downey Jr. Wins Best Supporting Actor at 2024 Critics Choice Awards

Robert Downey, Jr. won the Critics Choice Award for Best Supporting Actor last night, contributing to a total of eight awards taken home by Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer by the end of the ceremony. The awards show, hosted by Chelsea Handler and airing on The CW, also handed some high profile awards out to Barbie, The Holdovers, and Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. For Downey’s part, he took to the stage with grievances to air, quoting some of the worst reviews of his career, which you can imagine generated some big laughs in a room full of critics and fellow celebrities.

Oppenheimer is the true story of J. Robert Oppenheimer, widely credited as the man who invented the atomic bomb. While he and others considered the weapon essential to ending the carnage of World War II, Oppenheimer had difficult relationship with his work once it was a reality that could claim lives and alter the course of history. In the film, Downey plays Lewis Strauss, a founding commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and an antagonist to Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy).

“The Critics Choice Association, they’ve given me such beautiful feedback, really just so many great moments,” Downey Jr. said during his speech. “And some of it’s so poetic, I just want to share some of their thoughts with you over the years.”

He went on to quote reviews with phrases like “sloppy, messy, and lazy” and “amusing as a bedlocked fart.”

Here’s the official synopsis:

Written and directed by Christopher Nolan, Oppenheimer is an IMAX-shot epic thriller that thrusts audiences into the pulse-pounding paradox of the enigmatic man who must risk destroying the world in order to save it. 

The film stars Cillian Murphy as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Emily Blunt as his wife, biologist and botanist Katherine “Kitty” Oppenheimer. Oscar winner Matt Damon portrays General Leslie Groves Jr., director of the Manhattan Project, and Robert Downey, Jr. plays Lewis Strauss, a founding commissioner of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

Academy Award nominee Florence Pugh plays psychiatrist Jean Tatlock, Benny Safdie plays theoretical physicist Edward Teller, Michael Angarano plays Robert Serber and Josh Hartnett plays pioneering American nuclear scientist Ernest Lawrence.

Oppenheimer also stars Oscar winner Rami Malek and reunites Nolan with eight-time Oscar nominated actor, writer and filmmaker Kenneth Branagh.

The cast includes Dane DeHaan (Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets), Dylan Arnold (Halloween franchise), David Krumholtz (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs), Alden Ehrenreich (Solo: A Star Wars Story) and Matthew Modine (The Dark Knight Rises).

The film is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and the late Martin J. Sherwin. The film is produced by Emma Thomas, Atlas Entertainment’s Charles Roven and Christopher Nolan.

Oppenheimer is filmed in a combination of IMAX® 65mm and 65mm large-format film photography including, for the first time ever, sections in IMAX black and white analogue photography.

You can buy Oppenheimer on disc and digital now, or you can wait until it comes to Peacock on February 16.