Ben Affleck backs Jennifer Lopez after Oscar snubs: “Enormous respect and admiration”
If you’re wondering who’s backing Jennifer Lopez amid those Oscar snubs, Ben Affleck’s your answer.
Asked in a new Variety interview why the Academy keeps overlooking Jennifer Lopez, Ben Affleck didn’t hedge. He started by saying out loud what everyone assumes when exes are involved.
“I’m biased. I have an enormous amount of respect and admiration for what she can do,” he said.
From there, he zoomed out to how awards actually work. Affleck said he’s often disagreed with winners over the years and argued that trophies aren’t a definitive measure of artistic worth. He even joked that no one dies, arrives in heaven, and gets told which movie really deserved best picture of 1986 — it ’s just people voting, with all the subjectivity that implies.
Lopez remains Oscar- less despite recent runs that had critics expecting her name on nomination morning. Affleck also had a front-row seat to one of those campaigns: he helped produce Kiss of the Spider Woman through Artists Equity, and the pair continued to work together even after their marriage ended in 2025.
- Hustlers — Lopez’s widely praised turn as Ramona
- Kiss of the Spider Woman — renewed awards attention with Affleck on board as a producer
The tech curveball
In a separate chat for GQ’s One More Question, Affleck revealed he’s been quietly geeking out over machine learning for years thanks to time spent around visual effects — including running a small VFX outfit before launching Artists Equity.
“I can write pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that,” he said, before casually bringing up convolutional neural nets, tensors, edge detection, feature extraction and GPU workflows.
He said that curiosity opened doors at Google and OpenAI , where he sat in on early looks at transformer-based video generation. The access was part celebrity, part genuine interest — but the takeaway was practical: he came away focused on the tech’s limits around consistency and creative control for filmmakers.
That helped lead to InterPositive, an AI company he founded to build tools for directors and editors. Netflix bought it in March 2026 , folded Affleck in as a senior adviser, and later disclosed a purchase price of about $587 million.