Bennifer has survived tabloid hysteria, two engagements, two decades, one marriage, one divorce, and enough paparazzi flashbulbs to power Los Angeles. Yet through every romantic plot twist, Ben Affleck has remained strikingly consistent about Jennifer Lopez’s talent.

Their marriage ended in 2025, but their professional connection survived through Kiss of the Spider Woman, which Affleck helped produce through Artists Equity. Now, Lopez is still missing an Oscar nomination despite acclaimed turns in Hustlers and Kiss of the Spider Woman.

Ben Affleck has finally weighed in. 

During a new Variety interview, Ben Affleck was asked why Lopez has repeatedly been overlooked by the Academy. His answer began with an admission that he is hardly a neutral observer.

“I’m biased. I have an enormous amount of respect and admiration for what she can do,” he said.

Affleck then widened the conversation beyond Lopez. Awards, in his view, operate inside a deeply subjective ecosystem where commercial performance, personal taste, and voter preferences rarely line up neatly. He acknowledged that he has often disagreed with who wins, suggesting that Oscar results should never be treated as definitive measurements of artistic worth.

His funniest argument arrived with a little metaphysical perspective. Affleck joked that nobody dies, reaches heaven, and receives confirmation from God about which film was truly the best picture of 1986. Awards, he said, are ultimately just a bunch of people voting on movie prizes.

That perspective carries extra weight given their shared professional history. Affleck co-produced Kiss of the Spider Woman, while Lopez earned renewed awards attention for the performance. Their relationship ended, but his public praise has remained steady. 

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Affleck may be relaxed about trophies, but another corner of Hollywood has him thinking much harder about the future.

In GQ’s One More Question, Ben Affleck revealed a surprisingly technical side. He explained that years of working around visual effects led him into machine learning long before generative AI became Hollywood’s favorite panic button.

“I can write pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that,” he said, before casually discussing convolutional neural networks, tensors, edge detection, feature extraction, and GPU workflows.

Affleck said that his interest grew from the film industry’s shift from analog to digital and from running a small visual-effects company before Artists Equity. That curiosity eventually put him in rooms with Google and OpenAI teams exploring transformer-based video generation. Affleck joked that celebrity gave him an unusual access pass: he could simply call and ask to see what they were building.

Deeper conversations with engineers changed his outlook once he saw the limitations around consistency and creative control. That experience helped lead to InterPositive, the filmmaker-focused AI company Affleck founded. Netflix acquired it in March 2026, with Affleck joining as a senior adviser. The purchase price was later disclosed at approximately $587 million.

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What do you think about Ben Affleck’s comments on Jennifer Lopez’s Oscar snubs? Let us know in the comments.