Matt Damon and Ben Affleck have been arguing about movies together for decades, so it feels fitting that one of their old Oscar ballots has become a new topic of conversation. Long before The Matrix became required viewing for fans of the best action movies of all time and philosophy students alike, the two friends were apparently among the people trying to push it into the Best Picture race.
While promoting their 2026 movie release, the hit Netflix thriller The Rip, Damon and Affleck revisited that vote in an interview clip shared by BioWorthInfo on Instagram. In the video below, Damon recalled their support drew scoffs at the time, even though the movie was already being praised for its action and revolutionary camerawork. The surprise came later, when Damon discovered playwright and filmmaker Kenneth Lonergan had made the same choice.
When that movie came out in 1999, everyone was like, ‘Oh, it’s a revolutionary action movie, and all this stuff, and the way they do this new camera technique.’ We both voted for it for Best Picture for the Oscar, and I remember people kind of scoffing, like, ‘The Matrix?’ And then I remember talking to Kenny Lonergan a few years later, and he had voted for it for Best Picture.
Damon said the movie’s technical achievements were only part of the reason it deserved serious consideration. He and Affleck believed the Wachowskis had made something far more ambitious than a stylish action movie. Ben Affleck said the film’s notion of the future” was what drew him in most, but Matt Damon I think said it best.
It’s become more relevant with each passing year.
Affleck explained the film had anticipated major questions about technology and what human existence might look like in the future. He described it as not just one of the best movies of the ’90s, but one of the most “seminal” movies ever made, and that assessment is much easier to accept now than it might have been in 1999. It certainly sounds like they stand by their Oscars vote.
That gets to the real reason their vote has aged so well. Bullet time was the shiny hook in 1999, but the movie’s ideas kept spreading long after audiences stopped wondering how the camera moved around Neo. The Matrix imagined people living through constructed digital identities, trusting systems they barely understood and struggling to distinguish physical experience from manufactured reality. Those questions sound less like science fiction with every passing year.
The Matrix did not receive a Best Picture nomination for the 1999 movie year. American Beauty won the top prize at the 72nd Academy Awards, while The Matrix competed in four technical categories and won all four: film editing, sound, sound effects editing and visual effects.
That sweep proves the Academy recognized how expertly the movie was made. Damon and Affleck were arguing for something more ambitious because they were ahead of the curve and realized that the action-heavy science-fiction movie could also be the year’s defining artistic achievement. This was still a difficult case to make in an awards culture that often treated genre filmmaking as a technical playground rather than Best Picture material.
The fact that Lonergan, writer and director of the heartbreaking Manchester by the Sea, reportedly reached the same conclusion also makes the story more interesting. Damon and Affleck were not simply two young actors dazzled by leather coats and impossible stunts, but a dramatist known for intimate, character-driven work saw its Best Picture value, too. That’s a party I wouldn’t mind being in.
More than 25 years later, their “unpopular opinion” barely sounds controversial. The Matrix altered action filmmaking, gave popular culture a new visual language and built its thrills around questions audiences are still wrestling with. (Though some people would love to have skipped the sequels.) Damon and Affleck did not vote for a future classic because they knew exactly where technology was heading, but instead recognized that the movie was already asking the right questions.
Fans can check out the Good Will Hunting writing and acting duo in their own action film, The Rip, with their Netflix subscription. Or, if you want to revisit the groundbreaking The Matrix, you’ll need to rent it with an Amazon Prime subscription.