Robert Downey Jr lost the first Oscar he was ever nominated for, and he lost it to Al Pacino. The ceremony was held on March 29, 1993. Downey Jr was 27, six days short of his birthday, and had spent the previous year turning himself into Charlie Chaplin. Pacino won Best Actor that night for Scent of a Woman. The two have never appeared in a film together, before or since.
An old television clip of Downey Jr describing that loss began circulating again in May 2026, which is why the two names keep turning up in the same search. The account he gives in it is one he has given before, in almost the same words, and it is worth looking at closely.
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The 1993 Best Actor race was never really about Downey Jr
Pacino arrived at the 65th Academy Awards carrying seven previous nominations and no wins, going back to The Godfather in 1972. Voters had passed on him for Serpico, for The Godfather Part II, for Dog Day Afternoon. By 1993 the omission had become the story around him.
He was nominated twice that night. He lost Best Supporting Actor for Glengarry Glen Ross to Gene Hackman, then won Best Actor for playing a blind, retired army officer in Scent of a Woman. On stage, he said only what everyone in the room already knew.
“You broke my streak.”
The category he won was not a soft one. Alongside Downey Jr, the nominees were Clint Eastwood for Unforgiven, Stephen Rea for The Crying Game, and Denzel Washington for Malcolm X. A 27 year old with one nomination was competing against a two decade debt the Academy had decided to settle.
What happened to Downey Jr afterwards
The decade that followed is a matter of court record. He was arrested in 1996 for possession of heroin, cocaine and an unloaded gun, and given three years of probation. He was jailed for close to four months a year later after missing a court ordered drug test. He missed another in 1999 and was sentenced to three years in prison, serving roughly fifteen months. Four months after his release he was arrested again.
His career restarted with Iron Man in 2008. By then he had lost a second Oscar, for Tropic Thunder, to Heath Ledger.
He was in awe of Pacino long before any of this came up
In 2014, talking to Deadline about the actors who shaped his idea of what a movie star was, Downey Jr named Pacino as the defining figure of the 1970s and said he was in awe of him. He added that he envied Johnny Depp for having built real friendships with Pacino, Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson, and that he wished he had found a moment to suggest dinner.
Pacino has never publicly answered him.
The version Downey Jr tells about losing
By January 2024, Downey Jr had a third nomination, for Best Supporting Actor in Oppenheimer, and had already won the Golden Globe and the Critics Choice Award for it. He was going to win. That was the week he sat down on The View and explained that he had been lucky to lose in 1993.
“I was young and crazy,” he said, adding that a win at that age would have put him under the impression that he was on the right track.
He said the same thing about the Ledger loss. Both defeats, told the same way, sixteen years apart, each one recast as a warning he needed at the time. Whether that is memory or something he has arrived at since, the framing does not depend on who beat him. Pacino is interchangeable inside it.
Pacino was on stage when Downey Jr finally won
Downey Jr won Best Supporting Actor at the 96th Academy Awards on March 10, 2024, six weeks after that interview aired. Later the same evening, Pacino walked out to present Best Picture, the last award of the night.
He skipped the list of ten nominated films and opened the envelope.
“My eyes see Oppenheimer,” he said.
The room did not know what to make of it. Presenters read every title aloud, and Pacino had read none. He issued a statement afterwards saying the shortened format had been written by the show’s producers rather than chosen by him, and Academy chief executive Bill Kramer defended the delivery publicly. The award went to the film’s producers, not to Downey Jr, who had collected his own hours earlier.
Both men were in the same room, on the same night, for the same film. Neither said a word about 1993.
Why the clip came back in May 2026
On May 1, 2026, footage from an earlier Jimmy Kimmel Live appearance started moving across social platforms. Kimmel asks about the Chaplin nomination. Downey Jr describes hearing Pacino’s name read out.
“They must have misread that.”
He goes on to say that in your twenties you assume everything will keep going your way, and then it does not. It is the same account he gave on The View, delivered to a different host.
Separately, a comparison trend has been running on social media in which users post photographs of a young Pacino beside Downey Jr and argue about the resemblance. No reporting sits behind it.
Where the two actors stand in 2026
Downey Jr returns to Marvel as Doctor Doom in Avengers: Doomsday, scheduled for December 18, 2026.
Pacino, who turned 86 in April, had two films arrive in June. He appeared in Netflix’s In the Hand of Dante opposite Oscar Isaac, Gal Gadot and Martin Scorsese, and starred as CIA operative Robert Maheu in Killing Castro, which premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival. Shakespeare’s Globe named him the recipient of its 2026 Sam Wanamaker Award for his contribution to theatre.
Common questions about the Pacino and Downey Jr Oscar history
Did Robert Downey Jr lose an Oscar to Al Pacino?
Yes. Downey Jr was nominated for Best Actor for Chaplin at the 65th Academy Awards in March 1993 and lost to Pacino, who won for Scent of a Woman. It was Pacino’s first Oscar after eight nominations.
Have Al Pacino and Robert Downey Jr ever worked together?
No. They have never shared a film. Their only documented overlap in a single evening came at the 2024 Oscars, where both were present and neither presented to the other.
What did Al Pacino say when he won in 1993?
He told the room that the win had broken his losing streak, a reference to seven earlier nominations without a victory, starting with The Godfather in 1972.
Why did Al Pacino not read the Best Picture nominees in 2024?
Pacino said the abbreviated format came from the ceremony’s producers. Academy chief executive Bill Kramer supported that account afterwards.
What has Robert Downey Jr said about losing to Pacino?
That he was grateful for it. He has said a win at 28 would have convinced him he was already on the right path, and he has described his 2009 loss to Heath Ledger in similar terms.
Downey Jr has now given his account of March 1993 to at least two hosts, and reached the same conclusion each time. He won his Oscar in the end, on a night Pacino happened to be holding the last envelope. Neither man has ever suggested the coincidence meant anything.
