'I'm Biased': Ben Affleck Defends Jennifer Lopez's Oscar Snubs With the Air of an Ex Who Means It

Divorce has a script in Hollywood, and Ben Affleck keeps refusing to read from it. A year after his split from Jennifer Lopez was finalised, the 54-year-old actor-director used a Variety interview to do something ex-husbands in the glare of the celebrity press rarely attempt with credibility: defend their former spouse's honour, unprompted, and make it sound like the most natural thing in the world.

The occasion was the Oscars, or rather, their conspicuous absence from Lopez's career. Asked by Variety's Matt Donnelly about the Academy's history of overlooking the 57-year-old star's critically acclaimed performances, including 2019's Hustlers and last year's Kiss of the Spider Woman, Affleck did not hedge. "I'm biased," he said. "I have an enormous amount of respect and admiration for what she can do."

A producer's stake

The bias, it should be noted, is professional as well as personal. Kiss of the Spider Woman was produced by Artists Equity, the company Affleck shares with Matt Damon, with Lopez herself among the producers. He has seen her work up close, from the other side of the camera as well as the other side of a marriage, and his verdict on the Academy's blind spot was delivered with a philosopher's shrug. "What I've found with awards is that sometimes the degree of commercial success for things doesn't always correlate to my taste," he said. "It's a part of this weird, subjective business that people bring a lot of their own stuff to."

He went further, dismantling the awards industrial complex with a theology of his own invention: "I don't always think the right person won the right award. But guess what? I don't think you die and go to heaven, and God says, 'This was the actual best picture in 1986.' At the end of the day, it's just a bunch of people voting on movie prizes."

It is a deflection, of course but a telling one. Affleck, a two-time Oscar winner himself for Good Will Hunting and Argo, has every reason to believe in the institution and chooses, generously, to minimise it when it has failed someone he cares about.

A pattern of praise

Wednesday's comments do not exist in isolation; they extend a consistent post-divorce posture that has become one of the more quietly remarkable threads of the past year. In March 2025, Affleck told GQ he had "nothing but respect" for Lopez. A month later, at the premiere of The Accountant 2, attended by his three children and her two, he offered the definitive word to Entertainment Tonight: "For the record, Jennifer Lopez is spectacular, great to my kids, great ongoing relationship with them. I love her kids. They're wonderful. She's [an enormously important, tremendous person of a lot of integrity who I adore and am grateful to."

That the pair can speak this way is its own achievement. Their history spans two decades: an engagement that ended in 2004, a reunion, a July 2022 wedding, and a divorce filing on the two-year anniversary of that ceremony, finalised in January 2025. The tabloid machinery expected acrimony; instead, it has received a clinic in dignified co-existence, with five children, his Violet, Seraphina and Samuel, with ex-wife Jennifer Garner, and her twins Max and Emme with ex-husband Marc Anthony, at the centre of an extended family that seems to function better dissolved than most do intact.

The Variety interview added another grace note: Affleck praised both Lopez and Garner for doing "amazing jobs cultivating and accruing value in" social media, adding, "Don't think that's not real work. I couldn't do it." It is a small joke with a real compliment inside and a reminder that his public rehabilitation over the past decade has been built on exactly this register: self-deprecation wrapped around genuine regard.

The work at hand

Affleck's generosity arrives, not coincidentally, on the eve of his own moment in the awards-season conversation. Animals, which he directed and co-wrote with Connor O. McIntyre and Billy Ray, stars Kerry Washington, Steven Yeun and Gillian Anderson, and arrives in select theatres on Netflix on Friday, Oct. 9. His comments about prizes and their limits may yet be read back to him come nomination morning, but he seems serenely unbothered by the prospect.

There is something almost radical in the current ecosystem of celebrity divorce about an ex-husband who keeps volunteering admiration and meaning it. The cynics will note the convenient timing, the shared press obligations, the halo effect of graciousness. But Affleck's praise has been too consistent, too specific, and too devoid of self-interest to dismiss as strategy.

The Academy may never nominate Jennifer Lopez. Ben Affleck, by the sound of it, has already made his peace with the voters and his allegiance elsewhere.